


Somewhere in a field in Hampshire

by 5-door Wasabi (Ignica)



Category: Cthulhu Mythos - H. P. Lovecraft, Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: A dash of Snake Crowley, Crowley is just standard GO Crowley, Eldritch!Aziraphale, Eventual Happy Ending, Fluff and Angst, Hastur is already a mythos crossover character and I hope this justifies this nonsense, Lovecraftian, Lovecraftian Monster(s), M/M, May contain a bit of body horror, No Sex, OC Demon character, Pining Aziraphale (Good Omens), Protective Aziraphale (Good Omens), Who swears quite a bit, You can't scare me I work in Sales
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-06
Updated: 2020-06-01
Packaged: 2020-06-22 10:15:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 47,988
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19665388
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ignica/pseuds/5-door%20Wasabi
Summary: Abominations of the Mythos run on a different metaphysics to Biblical entities; they have partial immunity to things that would obliterate an average angel or demon. So even Heaven will recruit one sometimes, after centuries of vetting. But there’s no changing what you are, and sometimes, that gets H’zr aph’aal down. It’s all very well for H'aaztre, now a Duke of Hell. Hell doesn’t mind a bit of ooze.Crowley would’ve known how to cheer Aziraphale up, of course. Hell has the best tunes, and Crowley had been a legitimate demon.If only Crowley were here.





	1. Oh we weren't supposed to Be

**Author's Note:**

> _Written for prompt: 'Aziraphale is actually an Eldritch Abomination, and ashamed of it. Other members of the Good Omens cast try to cheer him up'._
> 
> _This started as a crack concept, and got a bit out of hand. It'll pan out at 10-11 chapters, each one lovingly titled with Pulp lyrics because it seemed a nifty gimmick at the time. Apologies to Gaiman, Pterry, Lovecraft...and Jarvis Cocker._

**A Soho Bookshop, 2010**

  
June the 21st. Summer Solstice. Litha. It had been a year to the day, and in the back room of his bookshop, Aziraphale uncorked a thrifty half-bottle of 1959 Musigny. He was not in the mood to get drunk, and he’d always hated waste. Nevertheless, the occasion called for the best.

He filled his own glass, and then another, which he placed next to a sepia photograph of a rakish chap in a Jazz Age outfit, perched on the bonnet of a brand-new Bentley. The angel had taken the photograph himself, using a box Brownie he’d bought in an attempt to drag himself into the 20th Century.

He raised his glass, and clinked it against Crowley’s.

“Cheers, old friend.” He should not let himself feel so wretched.

He took a sip of wine, and almost spat. Something was very wrong.

* * *

**Heaven, 4004 B.C.**

Technically, it was not a lie: H’zr aph’aal really was an angel.

A Messenger. A highly-sanctified postman. Post-thing.

Look, anyone could be a Messenger of the Divine. You just had to have the right attitude, and pass the interviews. And H’zr aph’aal had passed them all, with flying colours.

Too many flying colours, that was the problem — most of them either invisible to the human retina or liable to trigger raving madness, and some of them enough to give even a legitimate angel the sort of five-star migraine that Hildegard of Bingen would have envied, since Hildegard of Bingen had been a bit of a strange one.

Some of H’zr aph’aal’s Heavenly colleagues took the form of vast wheels covered with eyes, and went bowling through the firmament like a squad of gyroscopes, occasionally catching the light, a habit which was later to confuse the Hell out of terrestrial astronomers. That was thought perfectly normal behaviour, for an _ophanim_. And not a single one of Heaven’s staff really looked like an underwear model with silvered pinions; when they needed to manifest, every one of them used LucentGlory™ avatars. It wasn’t _fair_.

He damned well _was_ an angel. The word was a job description, not a piece of metaphysical taxonomy. Which was just as well, because H’zr aph’aal had never been over-happy to be questioned about his origins, which were ancient and noble, but not very Biblical. The one thing in his favour at the moment was that Heaven’s most accurate approximations of the human body, the ones suitable for day-to-day Terrestrial existence rather than descending in LucentGlory™, were clammy, oddly-articulated contraptions that made pops, clicks, and squelches, even when driven by an experienced operator.

In fact, it was somewhat puzzling why so much effort had been poured into the R&D of these things, considering how much use they were likely to get. Unlike the only two humans who currently yet existed, they had wings, which could be concealed at need, but like humans, they came equipped with toothy maws, slavering tongues, and stomachs filled with high-grade corrosives. They had digestions. They had _mucus_. They regularly produced miasmas worthy of the aeon-dead proto-earth. 

H’zr aph’aal had felt right at home in one. Not that he’d been allowed to try it on more than once.

“Look. I can easily drive one of these things, and none you lot even _want_ to,” he’d said, reasonably. “I don’t think it’s disgusting. Put me on any corporeal duty you like.”

The Dominion who was conducting his millennial review blinked at him, from the left side of itself to the right; the ocular equivalent of a Mexican wave. It was hypnotic.

“But how much of you, precisely, should we put?” Its voice was a duet for wind-chimes and a glass harmonica. “And what should we do with the rest?”

It was not a delicate question, but it was pertinent. Unlike the official Heavenly Host, who really could superimpose themselves on the head of a pin if necessary, like an incandescently holy microdot (even demons could do this, in a pinch, though they had more trouble reversing the process), H’zr aph’aal was an old-school pandimensional native and lacked the ability to turn himself into a singularity. When squeezed into the four — four! — official dimensions of this cramped Universe whose architect might possibly deign to employ him, he also weighed about five gelatinous tons, though they did not all have to be connected all at once. He was currently a radially-symmetrical pseudopod about the size of a telephone box, with the mouth conveniently located right at the top.

There was no getting round it: even in the sworn service of Heaven, H’zr aph’aal remained an Eldritch Abomination. And he spoke Enochian with an accent.

The Dominion chimed to itself. “Very well. No-one doubts your loyalty to the Cause, and its true — you’re psychologically well-adapted to the job. But I can’t promise you much. If we put dispatch you to the Terrestrial side, most of you will have to be hidden away in some pit or cavern…”

“I’m good with pits. And caverns.”

“And I can only offer you guard duty.”

“I’ll take it.”

“And also, we’ll have to change your name. Just a little.”

“What’s wrong with H’zr aph’aal? It’s a simple enough name. Your lot can pronounce it. Mostly.”

“It’s off-brand,” sniffed the Dominion, despite not having a nose. “The humans will be suspicious of it…later. A Heavenly name should be mellifluous, and free from apostrophes. Yours is unholy. Or non-holy. Abholy, perhaps. Either way, it just won’t do.”

“I can be as holey as you like,” said the offended Abomination, and proudly proved it, his newly-expanded orifices providing an assortment of views, among them a night-gaunt roost in the Dreamlands, a wrecked space-ship caressed by cosmic tentacles, and a first-night performance of The King in Yellow, where the audience was just getting to the bit where they hand out the forks.

The Dominion rolled its eyes, which once again took some time.

“Can I ask you one question, Aziraphale? Since that’s the closest to your name I can do for you. All the rest of your sort who were interested joined the Other Team, and frankly I can understand it, though I can’t agree with it. Why don’t you want to work for Hell?”

A wave of doubtful, queasy iridescence passed over all that was visible of the newly-rebranded angel.

“But…I just don’t think it would work. I’m a _good_ person. More or less. Good-ish, anyway. At least, I thought I must be quite a bit more good than bad, once I learned about them both — but how does one tell? Am I good? Officially, I mean.”

The Dominion smiled sadly, a sight guaranteed to make Dukes of Hell beg for quarter.

“Of course you are good, Aziraphale. Heaven help us all.”

\----------

  
His first posting had been Paradise. Or rather, the Eastern Gate of Paradise, which as anyone who’s done any door-work will tell you, is not quite the same thing. It had taken Aziraphale some time to get used to hefting a flaming sword, since no entity in the dimensions he’d originated from had a sufficiently permanent form to worry about being hit by sharp edges, however hot. The forms of combat he was accustomed to were…different. More intimately organic. Hungrier. _Nastier_ , Aziraphale realised with a jolt, and the first time he glimpsed the pair of humans, walking hand in hand to collect breadfruit for their morning picnic, it occurred to him quite spontaneously that he must be careful these fragile beings never saw his true form, most of which resided in a large cistern buried deep beneath the foundations of the Eastern tower.

The man’s name was Clay, which was not terribly imaginative of God. The woman’s name was Life, which was pretty. Aziraphale became quite fond of them.

Nevertheless, guarding Eden was glorified grunt work, and it was dull. Aziraphale could barely believe it when, patrolling the bounds of the place on another relentlessly beautiful evening, he caught sight of an actual interloper, slithering along the perimeter wall. _Inside_ the perimeter wall. He smiled, and drew his sword, and was on the creature in a moment — it was a series of great, dark, glittering coils, the corners of each ridged scale flecked with bronze, terminating in a small neat head with lidless, unblinking eyes. A snake that nevertheless still managed to have an expression on its face, and that expression read, _Oh shit_.

Aziraphale would do his duty. He would be Righteous. He would Smite.

But like many people since, he made the abrupt discovery that a snake was a work of art. A snake was incredibly beautiful, every enamelled scale different from its fellows, and at the same time almost identical, creating an effect that jewellers would later spend millennia trying to replicate. More particularly, a snake was a precision instrument. Detailed. Intricate. In particular, snakes were awfully good at _patterns_. Before he’d thrown in his lot with Heaven, Aziraphale, an entity of Chaos, hadn’t even had a word for those, in all the strange languages he knew.

The snake looked up at him, warily, its eyes as yellow as quinces.

“I ssuppose,” it said “that since you haven’t ssmitten me yet, we may as well be introdusssed. The name’s Crawly.”

* * *

  
**Staufen im Breisgau, the Black Forest, in what will eventually be Germany, 1542**

It had been a long, long time before Aziraphale had crossed paths with a certain Hastur, Duke of Hell. This was understandable, since upon signing up with Hell, the imposingly eldritch H'aaztre had entered its forces at ranking level (though even Hell insisted that he tweak his name). Heaven could never offer Aziraphale such a position. He would always remain an angel, unlikely to ever rise higher than a Principality. While his Heavenly handler took pains to compliment him on his suitwork, they both new that the one and only time Aziraphale had tried on a LucentGlory™ — an androgynous model, with long golden hair — he’d warped the face into a ghastly rictus, and imbued the interior with a stench that even Next to Godliness, Heaven’s most formidable deep-cleaners, had been unable to budge.

They'd had to scrap the thing into a pocket dimension, where it drifted unseen by anyone until one evening in 1797 when Samuel Taylor Coleridge took a heroic dose of laudanum, and woke up to find himself writing something about an An’cyent Ma-rin’ere, and screaming. He never fully regained the ability to spell.

The Black Forest job had been a contract cancellation. A formal nullification of an Infernal Pact, the remorseful owner of which was a fast-living scholar who’d made the traditional bargain: his immortal soul, in return for twenty-four years of good wine, fast women, and cutting-edge science. But lately, he’d sent in a scroll of complaint in Latin, Greek, and German, stating that when it came to scientific advancement, his infernal tutor simply hadn’t been up to the task.

It was a fair point. The tutor’s name had been Hastur, and he had even less use for the Laws of the Cosmos than most demons.

But Heaven didn’t have many Eldritch Abominations on its books, and a job like this could get confrontational. So Aziraphale had been deputised to collect and destroy the Pact, and Crowley had been sent along to witness said destruction, on behalf of Hell.

Hastur wasn’t going to take it lying down. When Aziraphale and Crowley found him, he was storming the first floor of the hapless scholar’s home in the town of Staufen, leaving a trail of glistening destruction as he conducted a top-to-bottom search. For an Eldritch Abomination, Hastur had a remarkably conventional way of doing things; Crowley had already concealed the trembling scholar in the wine-cellar.

“H’zr aph’aal,” said Hastur, who currently resembled a tall, thin man in a slashed doublet, with a jaunty little beard and a pearl in one ear. He was accompanied by another, shorter demon in trunk hose, who was holding a clipboard. The Duke of Hell looked displeased. He laid his hand on the curtains of a four-poster bed, which promptly turned into swathes of detestable putridity.

“H'aaztre?” The name roiled the air as the angel uttered it.

“The very same. Oh boy, ‘ _Aziraphale’_ , have I ever heard of _you_. An Angel of the sodding Lord. I said I wouldn’t believe it ‘til I saw it. And you can back right off, pal. That man is Hell’s property: signed, sealed, and delivered. I don’t know where you’ve hidden him, but you can blessed well hand him over.”

“I believe there’s some difference of opinion on that,” said the angel politely. “He did put in a prayer to Heaven.”

“You’re lying,” sneered Hastur, “or close enough to it. If he’d repented, I’d know about it. Besides, his kind are never contrite.”

“All right, maybe he didn’t formally repent, but he certainly put in a complaint. He says he didn’t get full value. That the contract wasn’t fair.”

“Full value!” put in the shorter demon, who was carelessly wearing trunk hose in a style that the most fashion-forward wouldn’t think up until the 1580’s. “And a fair contract, forsooth! We’re _demons_!”

“Shut up, Ligur,” said the Entity Formerly Known as H'aaztre, and now styled Hastur, Duke of Hell. “Look, Aziraphale, I delivered exactly what I said I would. Wine, women, power, necromancy, travel, scientific kudos…”

“And therein lies the rub, I’m afraid. Twenty-four years is a long time in terms of academic research, Hastur, and what once sounded cutting edge can be disproved. Even made to look ridiculous. Our client claims that once past ‘the world is round’, virtually nothing you told him turned out to be true. Other academics are laughing at him. We had to come up with a new word for all the things you told him.”

“Pseudoscience,” put in Crowley, helpfully.

“And you can shut up too, snake.” Hastur’s human countenance went puce. “Aziraphale, are you calling me thick?”

“Well, you tell me. How many atoms in a mole?”

Hastur thought very hard. “Are we talking an ordinary mole here, or star-nosed Pta’alphx, Snouter of the Pits of Leng…”

“And what’s the Second Law of Thermodynamics?”

“I’m a demonic abomination! I don’t have to think about this! And besides, he hasn’t properly repented. He’s mine by right.”

Aziraphale didn’t budge. “I believe, you know, that that’s why Heaven sent _me_. In case there was some difference of opinion.”

Hastur licked his lips. “Alright,” he said slowly, his face already starting to blur, “I’ll fight you for him. First to cry ‘uncle’ has to hand him over, and no further complaints.”

Aziraphale nodded. Ligur and Crowley gave each other a look, and Hastur saw it. “What about those two, oh Servant of Light?”

“Hastur, I know you to be an Abomination of your word. Don’t hurt my companion, and I won’t hurt yours.”

He held out his hand cordially, and the Duke took it. Aziraphale braced himself for the ordeal to come. Hastur had never been over-subtle, but he was strong. And _old_.

\----------

As soon as his palm touched Hastur’s, the Duke’s fingers darkened and elongated, burrowing under the skin of Aziraphale’s arm like sharp-snouted maggots, racing towards the heart that was no longer there — since during the time Hastur has spent posturing, Heaven’s most abominable angel had been quietly rearranging his internal anatomy. He no longer had a heart. Nevertheless, it hurt.

“Charm the door shut,” he said to Crowley, curtly. “And don’t look.”

Aziraphale drew in his breath sharply, and most of his face came with it, funnelling down his throat like a magician’s handkerchief, revealing a maw as round as a lamprey’s. Surrounding it was what he did best — eyes by the thousand, of all sizes from an orange to a grape, roaming over his body like foam. Though it was true that the pupils of most eyes did not have _fangs_. These were devouring eyes, ravenous eyes, and whatever they gazed at, they consumed.

Stray patches of the room began to _vanish_ , as if reality had blundered into a swarm of cookie-cutter sharks.

But mostly, the eyes looked at Hastur, eating him inch by inch. The demon flailed, eroded, swore a curse that shot up from the roof like backwards lightning, then reformed into a mass of threadlike maggots, each one no thicker than a straw. There were a _lot_ of them, and each was pointed at one of Aziraphale’s eyes, unerring as the needles of a compass.

Then Hastur spat at Aziraphale, and for the apple of every eye, there was a worm. Aziraphale lost his focus — he _blinked_ , dammit — and then spilled into anatomical madness.

They fought until he floor of the bedroom was eaten away like colander, and vitreous humour pattered to the flagstones of the Great Hall beneath. Both Aziraphale and Hastur began drawing on their hidden physical mass, until the melee of eyes and worms was first the size of a carthorse, and then an elephant, the eyes the size of cannonballs, the maggots as thick as your wrist.

The centre could not hold, and it didn’t. As Crowley and Ligur stood on tiptoe on the skirting-boards, arms flattened against the wall, both demons trying very hard to look as if this sort of thing was completely routine for them, the entire floor dropped out, in a shower of worms, eyes, ichor, pseudopods, acids not found in any terrestrial formulary, Colours out of Space, and palpable, combat-grade madness, with a sound that the inhabitants of Staufen im Breisgau, currently hiding under their tables and beds and praying as fervently as they ever had in their lives, later swore never to describe, beyond that it had been ‘a bit of a racket’.

Crowley peered downwards, between his feet. Then he decided, _To Heaven with the feet_ , and descended to the floor in coils. Ligur had already repaired to the relative safety of the ceiling, and wrapped himself up in a web.

The things that had been Aziraphale and Hastur — no, the things that _really were_ Aziraphale and Hastur — disengaged themselves. Circled each other. Assessed the damage. And there was somewhat less of Hastur.

“ _Satis_. Genug. I concede," said the pillar of maggots, sourly. "Besides, this little bastard’s hardly worth it. And you think I’m stupid, with your fancy rules, but I’ll tell you one thing, H’zr aph’aal: Order can’t last forever, and Chaos can only win, because your precious Second Law, the one you think I can't remember, is the only one that counts. And when the rest of them find out — in Heaven or Hell, who cares? — they’re not going to like it.”

The infernal Abomination took his trans-dimensional leave, dragging Ligur along for the ride. Aziraphale slumped in the ruins of what had recently been a desirable Sixteenth-century home. He was triumphant. He was dejected. As Crowley slithered cautiously down to join him, he didn’t even have the courage or honesty to acknowledge to the old serpent that Hastur had been bang to rights. In the gospel according to Crawling Chaos, there were only two sorts of stuff in the Universe: Self, and Notself.

Self was good, but Notself was not bad. Notself was _dinner_.

\----------

“That was quite a sight,” said Crowley, when he was back in roughly human form, which was more than could be said for Aziraphale. He licked his lips, nervously, with a tongue that was still forked. Scales began to ripple beneath his skin again; his irises were still a startled yellow, obviously reptilian. “Blessings, I can’t even keep a grip on my own form. See what you’ve done to me.”

“I thought I told you not to look.”

“Not to look where, exactly? You both got everywhere. And I don’t have _eyelids_.”

“Forgive me. I forgot.”

“And anyway, I could still see you both, even when I’d covered my eyes with my hands. Pretty, pretty colours. I need a drink, Aziraphale. I need _all_ the drink.”

There was a polite but inquisitive knock at the door that led down to the wine-cellar.

“Don’t come in!” gurgled Aziraphale, in a flat panic. “Crowley, he can’t see me like this. You talk to him.”

Crowley opened the door a chink. The man who’d knocked was wearing a fur-lined academic gown, and clutching a bottle in his hand. His hair and beard were also completely white, which they hadn’t been a few hours ago. He might have not been the world authority on the esoteric that Hastur had promised to make him, but he knew enough to gaze into a pair of yellow, slitted eyes in an approximately human face, know he was looking at yet another demon.

“ _Ach, Flitzkakke in Excelsis Deo_ ,” he swore, rather mildly in the circumstances. “So, it’s with you lot that I have to go? Am I even still alive?”

“You’re alive. But I’d leave here very soon if I were you. Do you have another way out?”

“The root-cellar has a hatch, for turnips. Not a very dramatic final act. From an artistic perspective, it might’ve been better to let them take me.”

“It would _not_ , and you'd do well to believe it. Look, no-one will suspect you survived this. Don’t stop to get your books, don’t look behind you, just take whatever money you’ve got on you, and keep travelling in a straight line away from here until you get religion. Or drop off the face of the Earth. Or die. Or anything else that takes your fancy, but the less arcane, the better.”

The scholar looked him over: a searching, restless stare. _Yes, you’re the bloody type_ , Crowley thought to himself. The people who who translate the accursed manuscript, who solve the puzzle-box, who lick the specimen for a bet. The ones who chant before a mirror, who unroll mummy-wrappings embroidered ‘DOOM’ in eighteen languages, who buy tickets to plays that no-one has lived to review. The ones who, having heard of a monster that sets you riddles and eats anyone who can’t answer them, set out on a mission to find the blessed thing and get its autograph.

On the other hand: exploration, mathematics, medicine, astronomy, navigation, metallurgy, zymurgy, and all the other fruits of human curiosity. A saving curse; a blessing that all too often got you killed. But _someone_ has to be the first person to ever try blue cheese.

“You poor devils,” said the scholar, sombrely. “You can’t understand what it’s like, to want to _know_. It was never about the money. Help yourselves to anything that’s left.”

\----------

Later, in the wine-cellar, when they’d both managed to drive off the demon of sobriety and Aziraphale looked presentable again, he had apologised and apologised and apologised, long past the point where is was sensible. They’d done what they came to do, after all. The Pact was ash on the wind. The scholar was going to reform his ways, if only for a week or two. Hastur and Ligur had bogged off back to Hell. Job done.

“If you’re really that sorry, you can open another bottle of Tokay,” said the practical demon, propping his feet up on a barrel, and draining the last of his wine. “An’ not — hic! — not by just starin’ at the cork, either, though it is a neat trick. You’re more grotesque than most of my colleagues.”

“Thanks.”

“Not just grotesque; _differently_ grotesque. Never seen anything like it — hic! — an’ I’ve seen a lot, b’lieve me. Those colours you went back there have no name in any language. Not in Enochian. Not in Mu’an. Not in anything. They _literally_ have no names, Aziraphale.”

“You should be cowering before my righteousness, though,” pointed out the angel, who had reassumed his normal shape. “If you cower for other reasons, it confuses the issue.”

“I was _not_ cowering!”

“You were!”

“Wash not…oh, alright then. It’s — hic! — it is bloody impressive. Eldritch, even. It scares _me_.”

“That’s still not really an endorsement of my holiness. Maybe I should go back to working alone.”

“No. You’re — hic! — you’re all right really, Aziraphale. Hz’r ap’haal. Whatever your name is. You’re a good mate, is what you are.”

It was more than enough. “You’ve got the apostrophes wrong,” complained Aziraphale, to conceal the fact he was bursting with pride. Crowley just grinned, and raised his glass.

One thing was true, though: Hastur had found a pal in Hell, just as Aziraphale had. The Abominable Duke really had formed an unlikely friendship with Ligur, who, like Crowley, was a genuine demon, and unlike Crowley, was a genuine sadist. Four hundred and fifty years later, this friendship was to have serious repercussions.

* * *

**Clopton Stoke, Hampshire, 1940**

“Well, I’ve found a new billet for you,” Aziraphale’s handler had chimed at him, in a Heaven-side briefing room. It had been roused at short notice, and was grumpy as a Dominion could decently be. It was not welcome news to Aziraphale, either. Unusually, he’d grown rather fond of his current Terrestrial lodgings — and there was a war on. Heaven and Hell were both working overtime, which was probably why the miraculous warding on his cave had abruptly failed.

That was no-one’s fault really. It couldn’t be helped. Aziraphale had subsequently raised the alarm himself, but by that time, the damage was done.

The Terrestrial year was 1940. Somewhere in the Dordogne, a teenage boy had just managed to rescue his dog, which had fallen into a deep pit, before it had wandered far enough into the cave beyond to be absent-mindedly devoured by the resident Eldritch Abomination, which (like the more ambulant part of Aziraphale) sometimes forgot that it didn’t really need to eat at all. Then the boy had told his three mates about his exciting find, and all four of them had decided to come back at the weekend, with lanterns and sandwiches.

This was bad news for Aziraphale, who had stowed most of his five tons in the cave since before the French Revolution. He had really liked that cave, enough to visit it without occasionally being forced to by his pan-dimensional link. He would bathe its painted walls in a gentle glow, then cover himself with eyes, though he was careful not to generate any ravenous ones. He only used human eyes, down in his private residence.

Because those paintings were human masterpieces. Aziraphale had never ceased to marvel at the drive to fuse creativity with order, at the desire for a _pattern_ , however transient the pattern might be. It was something well worth protecting.

“…and you won’t like the new place,” went on the Dominion. “It’s a dene-hole.”

“A _what_?”

“An ancient chalk mine, outside a village in Hampshire. That’s in England, by the way. The archaeologists checked it out in 1892, and again in the Thirties, and found absolutely nothing of interest, so they’re unlikely to bother you now. I’ve already had it warded — and to my own specifications, this time. Ever been to Clopton Stoke?”

\----------

As Spitfires patrolled the skies over Britain, the portion of Aziraphale that resembled a fussy, slightly portly man in a cream-coloured suit made a visit to Hampshire, clutching a butterfly-net and a notebook for cover, and returned looking exhausted, his knees covered in grass-stains, the switch completed. The Dominion had been right: the dene-hole was a definite downgrade, and unadorned with anything that might bring Aziraphale back there more often than he possibly had to. But beggars can’t be choosers; at least it was quiet. World War II had been decidedly the reverse, and Aziraphale had found himself sometimes returning to the dene-hole in spirit, just for the chalky, bloodless peace of it.

And most of him had been there ever since. The first of the two deliberate visitors the place had ever had was in the summer of 1954, when a dark-haired fellow, also armed with a butterfly-net for cover, had parked his Bentley by the side of the road to Clopton Stoke, plodded out to Dene Meadow with a skeptical look on his face, disappeared for several hours, and returned with the look of a man who has abundantly satisfied his curiosity.

* * *

**Clopton Stoke, Hampshire, c. 1990**

His other visitor had been more recent.

One day in late autumn, a modest family saloon in proud-owner condition had stopped in the same lay-by Crowley had used, years earlier. A boy got out from one side of the car, and a man from the other — a man who had a moustache, and who always gave the impression of wearing an Argyle vest, even when he wasn’t. They opened the boot to change the boy’s shoes for wellington boots.

“I told you,” the boy was saying, hopping about on one leg, “I’ve always meant to come out here, ever since I heard about the place.”

“I know that, son. I just don’t understand why. God knows there’s nothing here.”

“ _Reasons_ ,” said the boy mysteriously, in a tone that would brook no argument, and finished getting his wellies on.

“Sure you don’t want me to come with you?”

“Positive.”

The boy seemed to know where he was going with the unswerving accuracy of a young naturalist, and marched across to Dene Meadow to the corner where Aziraphale’s pit was now protected by a chain-link fence, a battered sign advising passers-by to Please Keep Out, and several layers of miraculous warding, to the effect that there was nothing remotely interesting to the human mind to be found here.

From a pocket of his jacket, the boy took out a bulging paper bag with a note taped to it. He took aim, lobbed, and sent the bag sailing in a perfect parabola into the entrance to the dene-hole. Then he returned his still-bemused Dad, who drove him home.

The bag was full of lemon drops, the most benign offering theoretically possible, but even so, Aziraphale had taken a long time to pluck up the courage to read the note. It said:

_I know what you really are._

_And what you really are, is alright really._

_P.S. Thanks._

Which (since Aziraphale had never dared speculate about God’s personal opinion of him) doubled the number of people in the Universe who knew for sure that he was an eldritch abomination, and were perfectly OK with that.

Sentimental as always, Aziraphale had spun out those lemon drops, allowing the greater part of himself one per annum — until that dreadful day a year ago, when the human part of himself had got very very drunk, and the pullulating, weeping mass is the dene-hole had devoured every remaining lemon drop at once, and still it was no damned good, because Crowley was gone.

\----------

Aziraphale had blamed himself; he should have seen it coming.

He and Hastur were both Abominations of the Mythos. And the Mythos ran on a different, less obedient metaphysics than that of Biblical entities: if Aziraphale could recall a few things, even after a miracle as seismic as he suspected had occurred, then so could a certain Duke of Hell

True, Aziraphale’s recall of the events of that strange summer was shifty and blurred, as if an eleven-year-old’s sticky fingers had swiped across his memory, laced with Double-Dip sherbet, and whatever it was that lay at the bottom of packets of Monster Munch. If questioned closely, he’d not have been able to say much beyond that something _really big_ had come very close to happening. But since Aziraphale wasn’t stupid, he had a few suspicions about what such a _really big_ thing, a thing too big to properly remember, might have been.

In hindsight, one particular thing was evident.

In all probability, Hastur had had a pretty legitimate grudge.


	2. Come on and kill me baby, while you smile like a friend...

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> …or, The Dire Revenge of Basil Kitrinos, Part the First.
> 
> This is going to play fast and loose with the ice-cream escapade that kicks off in St. James’ Park (which happens only in the TV version), and Crowley and Aziraphale’s brush with the concept of paintball, which is in the book. Hopefully the remix has enough novelty to entertain. Setting switched to Regents’ Park, because I am very original.

**London, 2009**

Over the six millennia since the two of them had thrown in their respective lots in with Heaven and Hell, Aziraphale had flattered himself that he was, when you got right down to it, considerably cleverer than a certain Infernal Duke. But Hastur was a very ancient Old One, older even than Aziraphale, and Old Ones simply did not forget completely, not even if some newfangled Antichrist told them to. Their metaphysics were _different_. Hastur remembered — just as Aziraphale did — that the summer of 1990 had been a damned close-run thing for planet Earth. In fact, he remembered rather better.

And he remembered one thing with some clarity. He recalled that his old mate Ligur had fallen victim to some nastiness involving holy water, and that whatever ‘Ligur’ it was who had been reinstated in the aftermath, he had never been the same. His appetite for cruelty, blunted. His puckish way with practical jokes — that prank on Michael Scotus had earned him an award — that was gone too. It was difficult to believe he was the same demon.

Crowley. Crowley had done it, that irksome squirt he’d run into in the Black Forest, the one who was thick as thieves with that angelic Abomination H’zr aph’aal. Crowley, the one who’d bolloxed up the job in Oxfordshire that was supposed to cover them all in fulminating glory, and hadn’t. Crowley, Hell’s most half-hearted demon, who’d drifted into damnation without even the proper courage to Fall — unlike Hastur, who had proudly nailed his Eldritch colours to Hell’s mast, and still had the fervency of the convert. It had been Crowley who had damaged Ligur.

Crowley, the traitor. Hastur was past the point of wanting to torture the flash bastard in any ordinary way; truly, he couldn’t tell whether he wanted to torment him or obliterate him. Situations like this called for something bespoke.

He’d chosen Crowley’s day of reckoning personally: June the 21st. Mythologically, this should be the day when the Forces of Light are strongest, and Creatures of Darkness shrink back into their lairs — but Evil, as Ecclesiastes was fond of warning anyone who’d listen to his ramblings, is perfectly happy under the Sun.

Hastur had picked the date for far more mundane reasons: it fell on a weekend, and the weather was likely to be good.

It was the date he’d set for the RogueWave Midsummer Madness All-in Charity Assassination Game, held in Regent’s Park, and sponsored by RogueWave water pistols. It was also supported by an aggressively up-and coming social media outfit, a hip new burger chain, a manufacturer of suncream, and endorsed by the Church of England, whose top brass thought it all sounded like just the sort of thing to bring in the young people. With the exception of the Church of England, the linking feature of all these enterprises was that Hastur had a stake in them. It is an error to suppose that people will only sell their souls for the Secrets of the Cosmos, or to date Helen of Troy. Plenty of people will do it to ensure that their burger chain succeeds.

The final generous but discreet sponsor was Leroy Jaune, a thrusting young company based in Canary Wharf, specialising in data analysis and viral marketing. In 2009, its CEO was a figure as indistinct as he was wealthy. Googling him would bring up only the fact that he existed, and that his interests were hunting, travel, and comparative religion, which was all roughly true. He gave his name as Basil Kitrinos.

Yes, Hastur was very ready for A. J. Crowley. Access to holy water had been the hardest part, but it wasn’t as if vicars were immune to sins of either the Will or the Flesh. His team had snagged three high-rolling clerical gamblers who’d do the job, in return for the sort of money that would take a _lot_ of praying to explain. After that it had just been a matter of recruiting enough genuine, hard-working vicars to give the operation cover, but Leroy Jaune had a couple of traits that the C of E lacked: it was very, very good at guerilla marketing, and it was cooler than a mammoth in permafrost.

Basil Kitrinos might clearly be older than forty, which was positively antique in a company like Leroy Jaune, but every one of his hand-picked team acknowledged that when it came to going viral, there wasn’t a thing that Mr. Kitrinos didn’t intuitively know. Not a damned thing. The man was attention capture, made flesh.

Aziraphale and Crowley were not the only ones to have a network of loyal agents.

Some time in mid-June, Aziraphale got a text message that surely came from Crowley, and Crowley got a text message that purported to have been sent by Aziraphale. Both messages suggested that it had been too long — and not to imply that anyone was missing anyone, not at all, but how about meeting up in Regent’s Park? The only thing that was awry with these messages was that in each case, the precise location in Regent's Park was different.

It hadn’t been necessary for Hastur to invoke either the Infernal or the Eldritch to achieve this. Human technology definitely had its Machiavellian points. The trap was set.

* * *

In the late 19th Century, philosophers determined that Fate has a serious echo problem, and that consequently, most events have a tendency to happen twice: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.

Just occasionally, Fate gets things the other way round.

And that was how it had happened, in fact. That was exactly how Aziraphale had stupidly lost his friend.

* * *

**Sunday the 21st of June**

**Prelude: Mayfair, 11.30am**

A. J. Crowley had let it be known among the other residents of a certain converted townhouse in Mayfair that he worked in Crisis Management, which was scrupulously truthful: you could spend _years_ drip-feeding a proper, serious crisis. It also explained why he came and went from his flat at such odd hours.

But he was up early today. It was well before midday and he was wandering barefoot over his pristine Berber carpet, in a shade so pale that Crowley’s rare visitors usually remarked that it must be the Devil’s own job to clean. He was in excellent spirits, a mug of black coffee in one hand, basking in the glow of a job well done and humming the chorus of _Keep Young and Beautiful_ to his houseplants. Crowley knew he’d never win a contest for Hell’s Most Evil, but for the past few months he had been respectably diabolical, shuttling between London, New York, Tokyo, and Hell, where he’d had to explain to the Finance Department the potential of what Mammon had persisted in calling ‘bits of coin’. Frustrating work, but worth it. He probably wouldn’t mention it to Aziraphale.

It had been some time since he’d crossed paths with Heaven’s most eldritch angel. Not that he’d admit it, but he missed the old Abomination. But today, they were scheduled to meet up. There was a really good ice-cream kiosk in Regent’s Park, and whatever divine or eldritch business Aziraphale had been up to lately, Crowley was pretty confident that they didn’t have cinder toffee in Heaven, or mint choc chip in the Outermost Void.

Crowley pocketed his smartphone, a dark glossy slab without visible branding, as featureless as an onyx mirror. John Dee would probably have tried to scry in it. Human technology never got old — which was mostly because they were forever chucking it away.

The surprising thing was that in the year 2009, Crowley still retained two landlines, for purposes that he kept to himself. Each one was now attached to a fairly-dated cordless phone with an old-school base station, though only one was kept on his desk. This was his decoy; the other one was considerably harder to find. It was always a good plan to have a bolthole. Voicemail was no good, he’d discovered. Voicemail could shove you _anywhere_ , and then you could get stuck. Not everything was an advance on the 90’s.

Nevertheless, Crowley reflected, existence was good. He paused on the threshold of his flat, looked down at his bare feet, thought for a second, and was still humming a tune when he set off for Regent’s Park, wearing snakeskin deck shoes.

\----------

About ten minutes after Crowley had left to meet Aziraphale, a couple in their twenties strolled into his street. The man wore a discreet but literal dog-collar, together with sleeve tattoos in tribute to Hieronymus Bosch; the woman’s was hair dyed (presumably) a saffron that matched what were (presumably) her eyes. Each wore a messenger bag slung across their chest. Although they were incongruous, no-one interrupted the progress of Hastur’s aides as they made their way along the street, apparently distributing flyer menus for _Regiallo’s Pizzas — Hasty but Tasty!_ , a place with a curious logo, half-way between a triskelion and a hazard symbol.

Except that they always pulled them back at the last second, adroit as conjurers. Only when she came to Crowley’s block did the yellow-haired girl actually post her flyer, and then she blew a kiss through the letterbox. Security workarounds were her specialty.

Crowley warded his flat, of course he did. And the front door of his block. But among the very few entities in existence that can appear anywhere, in any dimension, with neither Summoning nor Permission, one of the most robust, persistent and hard to banish is the pizza menu flyer. Experienced magicians classify them as Chaotic servitor vermin, and blame their origins on that Italian hack Cagliostro, who frankly would work for _anybody_.

The flyer ascended cautiously into the stairwell, as if caught on a stray breeze that wasn’t there. First floor. Second. It didn’t do to be too obvious. From a distance, its eyes looked like a printed scattering of sliced olives. It was wary. If anyone came by, it would have to flutter to the floor, and bide its time. This was a serious mission; its first and last.

But no-one did come by. The flyer reached Crowley’s flat, and slid neatly under the door, its logo already beginning to bubble and smoke. By the time it reached the immaculate carpet on the other side, it was hot enough to leave a burn on the pearl-white carpet, the dark arms of the Yellow Sign expanding into jagged holes, fringed with gold.

A _thing_ pulled itself out of all three holes at once, then pummelled itself into the form of a spare, middle-aged man in the sort of smart-casual outfit that would cost an ordinary person a month’s rent, with a glint in his eye that said ‘I am Disruption incarnate’. The sometime Basil Kitrinos took a handkerchief from his back pocket, and mopped beads of ichor from his brow. That was the problem with being Eldritch. You sometimes had to take the long way round, and it had all been quite a risk, even for an Abomination as formidable as Hastur, who sometimes wondered why the humans daft enough to Summon him hadn’t worked out why he turned up in such a poor mood. He unlocked Crowley’s front door from the inside, and padded down to the ground floor to let his people in.

His two demonic lackeys had already reached the end of the road, got into a matt-black van marked ‘zolto:interior:design’ in shiny black letters that you needed to tilt your head to read, then driven around the block, emerging on Crowley’s doorstep in severe polo-necks and jeans; the woman’s startling hair now dark as basalt. They carried sample-books, which were for show, and a couple of leather-and-canvas holdalls, which were not. They contained tools. A bucket. And a large, ominous flask, which caused Hastur to grin nastily when it was finally set down on Crowley’s desk.

The tattooed demon sniffed the air. He belonged to that subclass of demons, much sought-after by discerning occultists, that excel in uncovering buried treasure. Finding carefully-hidden things was what he existed to do.

“Well then, Sir. Anything specific you’d like me to dig out?”

“Human recording technology. Anything after 1980. I’ll know it when I see it.”

From one of the holdalls, Hastur pulled out a rubber apron and gauntlets; his companions were more circumspect, and suited up like the first visitors at a crime scene. Contact with holy water wouldn’t finish off an Abomination like Hastur, whose essence would always remain Mythos, metaphysically speaking, even though he was staunchly loyal to Hell. But it could still hurt him plenty.

Crowley’s payback had been a long time coming. The risk was worth it. Hastur took out a phone that made Crowley’s look as if it could lose a few ounces, and brought up a scanned photo of Crowley, taken several decades ago. Not that it would matter; it wasn’t as if the bastard was in the habit of changing his look. In all probability he'd never leave Regent's Park, but if he did make a bolt for it, Hastur would enjoy himself even more.

He smiled to himself, and hit Send.

\----------

**Regent’s Park**

**Act I. The English Gardens**

The thing that bothered Crowley, sitting on a bench in Regent’s Park, was that Aziraphale was late. Aziraphale, who’d stood him up half-a-dozen times in as many thousand years. No, he had never _stood him up_ , that was a human term.

But there had always been a reason. Always. There had to be a reason now.

Crowley had arrived at Regent’s Park with his lip already curled, having scented from afar the reek of a charity gig. It was jolly. It was relentless. It filled all the space it could access, like twenty tons of money-flavoured candyfloss, a thing made of day-glo bunting, trestle tables, names on clipboards, beaming vicars, energy bars, sachets of suncream, inflatable paddling pools, facepaint, water pistols, joyous screaming, and banners emblazoned ‘RogueWave: Who Will Die, and Where Will They Find a Towel’?

And it had seemingly been scheduled at fairly short notice. A. J. Crowley, denizen of the bleeding edge, was familiar with the concept of a flashmob, but even so, this was not quite kosher. He’d just decided to call Aziraphale and ask where he was, when he saw someone approaching him. Purposefully.

The young man was wearing a T-shirt emblazoned Leroy Jaune, and slung across his chest was an ominously large RogueWave Splashtronic, for which he’d had to put down a deposit. His face already bore three stripes of greasepaint: purple, green, and orange, one for each contestant he’d taken down so far. Apart from this, he looked like a budding data analyst, which was exactly what he was. The young man’s name was Grant Tompkins. Although he was entirely human, he’d spent every day of the past three years doing Hell’s own work, headhunted at the specific request of Basil Kitrinos himself, and then put through a battery of aptitude tests that ran long to Rorschach blots, word association, and metaphors. Tompkins had been the standout candidate: he was intelligent, keen, ambitious — and he had no detectable powers of mental imagery. None at all.

Grant Tompkins wisely kept his smartphone in a waterproof pouch on a neck lanyard, and he was currently peering at the screen, comparing it to a sharp-dressed man in sunglasses, who was sunning himself idly on a nearby bench.

Those were surprisingly nice clothes, thought Tompkins, for a contestant brash enough to list himself in the ‘Open Season’ category (where you scored three points extra for each contestant you bagged, but anyone who picked you off had their entire score trebled). He’d better make sure he had right chap.

“Hey, aren’t you A. J. Crowley? Tony ‘Obliterator’ Crowley?”

The sunglasses turned lazily. Looked him up and down less lazily, took in the Splashtronic, read the slogan on his T-shirt — and suddenly, Grant Tompkins felt he had the man’s undivided attention, in much the same way you might sense the attention of a previously-snoozing cobra. Although he did not know it, this was an effect Crowley only had on people when he was rather worried himself.

“Posssibly,” hissed Crowley. “Who’s asking?”

The observation that all demons are paranoid is true, but doesn’t convey the inhuman speed with which a demon can conclude that someone’s out to get them; every one of Crowley’s senses was already flaring: danger Danger DANGER. He got to his feet.

  
_The teams of cheery young folk, handing out energy bars and suncream…_

_…looking after the paddling pools where the combatants came to reload…_

_…and every one of those teams had included a vicar…_

  
The young man grinned. “Name of Tompkins. But you can call me…Doom.”

But Crowley was already moving. He grabbed his jacket from the back of the bench, whirled it over his shoulder like a matador, and let it go flying towards the startled data analyst, who promptly fired 50cc of holy water into it. Crowley’s day-to-day look got him classed as ‘City tosser’ by all who saw him, but the number of _actual clothes_ he owned would make Gandhi’s wardrobe seem excessive. Willed into existence by the power of Hell, to a design more-or-less by Tom Ford, the jacket came apart into a soft explosion of burning threads, and drifted away in a cloud of brimstone.

When it cleared, Crowley was fifty yards away, running Hell for leather, and jinking like a man expecting sniper fire.

“Hey! Neat trick,” muttered Grant Tompkins to himself. “But against the rules. I’m gonna _get_ you, matey…and I’m calling for backup.”

\----------

**Act II. An Ice-Cream Kiosk**

Aziraphale, clad in his standard cream suit, a sky-blue canvas bucket hat, and a pocket square to match, had spent ten minutes in a sweaty queue for overpriced ice-cream, wondering if Crowley had stood him up — and if so, why — when his mobile rang. Thinking somewhat unangelic thoughts, he unfolded it.

“You’re late,” he pointed out. “Also, they’ve got Anchovy, Sriracha, or Cinder Toffee left. What would you like?”

“Holy water,” said Crowley’s urgent voice.

“Look, I think that’s in rather poor taste…”

“I’m serious. This is a hit.” Crowley was out of breath, but not audibly panicking.

“What? Who? Dear boy, my lot would never — ”

“ — _Hastur’s_ lot. He must have been planning this for months. You said he probably didn’t like me — well, you were damned right. Where are you now, angel?

“Near the Boathouse? Where you said you’d be?”

Crowley laughed in the way that was peculiar to demons, dry as a Pharaoh’s sock. “And I’m in the English Gardens. Where _you_ told me you’d be. _Think_ , Aziraphale.”

Aziraphale thought, then he slipped out of the ice-cream queue and began scanning the area. In the distance, behind a roped-off area adorned with jolly day-glo bunting, a girl armed with a gigantic water-pistol was chasing after another girl throwing water-balloons, both of them shrieking with laughter. He felt suddenly cold. “Look, you can’t tell me a demon would take a risk like that…”

“Hastur’s people are human, Aziraphale. All of them I've seen are human, and they’ve got holy water. The paddling pools are full of the stuff — I could sense it when I got near them — and all those blessed water-pistols are too. My jacket went up in smoke. I’ll be next, and I need to get out of here. How soon can you get to my flat, if you use The Shortcut?”

The Shortcut had other names, many of them hazardous to pronounce. It was not a nice place to be. It was ancient and ravenous, and even for a pandimensional native, traversing it felt like being on the conveyor belt of a sushi bar. Aziraphale had never actually used it in anger to reach Crowley’s flat. He’d tested the route, once, and that had been more than enough.

“As soon as you hang up, give or take a bit, and providing I find a spot no-one’s looking at directly. But…”

“Sounds good. There’s a cordless phone on the desk in my office. Ignore that one, and go into the kitchen. Open the cupboard next to the fridge and chuck out everything in it; there’s another phone under the false floor of the unit. Grab it, and get out of there fast.”

“Crowley, where are you, exactly?”

“In a gardener’s shed. I’ve got a rake wedged against the door, and all the warding I can muster. But I’ll have to make a break for it soon; they’ve got me cornered and this place isn’t watertight. They’re trying to take me down, and of course they think it’s all a game.”

There was a confused banging and yelling, made by what sounded like half-a-dozen young, enthusiastic people, all exceedingly eager to meet one A J. Crowley.

 _“….look, we know you’re in there, Tony,”_ shouted a cheerily aggressive male voice, _“and whoever caps you has their score tripled. Not very sporting, is it?”_

“Got to go,” said Crowley, in that way of his that only sounded calm. “As soon as I ring off, I’ll be on my way. Be careful — ”

His voice was rudely interrupted by the other voice musing, _“D’you know, lads, I don’t believe that door is really locked at all. One, two, threeee…”_

“Oh shit!” said Crowley. Aziraphale could hear him hastily shove the phone in his back pocket, and then, “Oh, _shit!”_

They was a splintering sound, as of a rake-handle giving way, but even above the racket, Aziraphale heard Crowley make that peculiar, penetrating _snap!_ with his fingers, in the way that implied the precise opposite of _‘Mortal, your wish is my command’_. Aziraphale always _hated_ it when Crowley overrode anyone’s free will, but he’d give it a pass, provided it was a dire emergency.

The racket went quiet, until a slightly confused voice said _“Hey, what’s wrong with you chaps? Snap out it it!”_

“Oh SHIT!”

And then Aziraphale heard the phone hit the ground.

\----------

**Act III. The Boating Lake**

The Reverend Agatha Kanu stood next to one of the vast weeping willows that swept their branches to the ground beside the banks of the Regent’s Park boating lake. She was feeling put-upon — and then guilty for feeling put-upon. That was the problem with being a vicar; people never expected you to get bored, nor to want to have silly fun yourself. She would have liked to be hunkered down near the English Gardens, armed with RogueWave Splashtronic of her own. Instead she was manning — womanning? — one of the remoter check-ins of the Midsummer Madness All-in Charity Assassination Game, guarding a paddling pool for refills. Competitors were not to refill from the lake; there was a theoretical risk of Weil’s disease. It’s not much fun to always be the responsible adult.

A man in a cream-coloured suit came sprinting along the path on the other side of the water. Or at least, he was presumably sprinting, judging by the way he covered the ground — though on close inspection, his actual stride was a rather hurried jog. Invisible power rolled off him in waves, together with an air of distress. He caught sight of the Reverend Kanu, with her trestle table, her clipboard, and her paddling pool, looked up and down the path, visibly decided _to Hell with it_ , and turned to cross the water in half-a-dozen paces. He didn’t make a single splash.

This would have been a more startling revelation had his feet actually been in contact with the ground, instead of three inches off it.

The willow’s shade revealed that the man’s eyes were currently _glowing_ — a nameless hue that any experienced occultist could have identified as Eldritch, but fortunately the Reverend Kanu, not having seen a genuine angel or demon before in all her life, had nothing to compare it to. But the man definitely fell under the category of And a Few More Things, Horatio, and he was wandering about in broad daylight, which was some bloody cheek.

“Good day to you, Reverend,” said the man, polite but desperate, “I may require your assistance.”

“I should think so. Your feet are three inches off the ground.”

“Whoops. Sorry. Well, I suppose that saves a bit of explanation.” He descended. The Reverend Kanu got out her clipboard. Maybe everyone needed to let their hair down occasionally, no matter what their responsibilities. She wasn’t about to judge.

“Well, which side are you on? Team Green, Team Purple, Team Blue, or Team Orange?”

“Team Heaven,” said the man, cautiously, sizing her up to see how she was taking it.

The Reverend Kanu raised her eyebrows. So this was really what they looked like. True, the man was dressed in white. He had glowing eyes, a tendency to levitate, and he was palpably _good_ , so good that it prickled at the back of one’s neck. Still, she’d been expecting something — grander, she supposed, and at the same time, less uncanny. But that made no sense.

“No kidding?”

“Not a vicarly way of putting it, but yes, dear lady. What I really need now is two favours. First, I need someone to make absolutely sure no-one peeps through these branches for about thirty seconds after I walk through them. And secondly, I need someone to pray for me. Short and sweet will do.”

“Wait a minute, can’t you — ”

He shook his head. “It would be…embezzlement, of a sort. But I need to be in time for something, you see. Something important. I really, _really_ need to be in time.” He took out his sky-blue pocket square, and managed to actually blow his nose with pathos. “Sorry.”  
  
“Buck up, man. Here it comes: O God, our heavenly Father, whose glory fills the whole creation, and whose Presence we find wherever we go: preserve this traveller; surround him with Your loving care; protect him from every danger; and please make sure he is in time. Through Jesus Christ our Lord. _Amen_. Will that do?”

“Admirably. How’s your Roof Fund?” asked the man.

“How’s everyone’s Roof Fund? The place hangs together by the Grace of God, and bathroom sealant.”

“St. Wigstan’s, isn’t it? Place in Kentish Town? With a stained-glass triptych of his martyrdom?”

She nodded, mutely. The man winced.

“Nasty business, that. Couldn’t talk him out of it. Anyway, I’d check your hymnal cupboard,” he said. “Bottom shelf, right at the back, under the Books of Common Prayer.”

“Good luck,” said the Reverend Kanu, which wasn’t a very holy thing to say, but the man smiled back, in a way that suggested he wasn’t about to be fussy. He performed a curious gesture, and then he walked through the swaying green curtain of the gigantic willow tree. The Reverend Kanu wasn’t one bit surprised when she followed him a minute later, and he wasn’t there any more.

\----------

A couple of days after the RogueWave Midsummer Madness All-in Charity Assassination Game was over, when the Reverend Kanu had confirmed that absolutely no-one else had seen the hovering man in the cream-coloured suit, she told herself again and again that whatever peculiar conversation she recalled must have been an effect of the heat. Look, the man had not been _hovering_ — it must have been some sort of localised mirage — and when she’d finished that rushed-job prayer, she had not felt reality _shift_ , slightly. And people wore some very strange contact lenses these days.

_“St. Wigstan’s, isn’t it? Place in Kentish Town…”_

At last she cracked, and did check the hymnal cupboard. Right at the back. And there the book was, under a tin full of drawing-pins, string, and old copper halfpence, wrapped in a moth-eaten hassock-cover. The title page read:

**_THE GRETE SHYPPE OF FOOLES OF THIS WORLDE_ **

**_I_ ** _mprinted in London in flete strete by wynkyn de worde._  
_Ye yere of our lorde M.CCCCC and xvii.The nynthe yere of ye reygne_  
_of our souerayne lorde kynge Henry ye viii. The xxi. Daye of June._

Later, she tried to price it up on AbeBooks, then on alibris, and ended up getting frustrated; her particular edition wasn’t on either of them. Then she searched for the phone number of Christie’s, where the head of the Rare Books department was going to need a nice cup of tea and a sit down.

\----------

**Act VI. London Zoo**

Crowley ran through Regent’s Park like a man possessed, heading for the Zoo.

To be fair, Crowley _always_ ran like a man possessed, but there was no mistaking that the dark figure currently legging it across Regent’s Park was running in a way that indicated he wasn’t having fun at all. Once across Chester Road, he’d managed to lose a couple of his pursuers by tactically dodging behind tree-trunks too narrow to hide a grown adult, but the bulk of Hastur’s team of crack data analysts were still on his case, whooping with joy and occasionally loosing off a few pints of holy water in his general direction. He could sense it coming for him, and jink, but one drop was all it would take. One drop…

 _He knows I won’t hurt them,_ thought Crowley savagely. _Hastur knows I won’t hurt them, and he’s using that against me._

Crowley had sometimes been accused by his Hellish handlers indulging himself with human pleasures. Though he had fobbed them off with the explanation that infernally good undercover work required infernally good cover, most of these accusations were 100% justified. He’d told himself it wasn’t his fault. In all the thousands of years that the Church had been warning humans about the blandishments of Hell, only a couple of pamphlets had been published for the benefit of Terrestrial-side demons, on the sore temptations of going native. For Crowley, the warning had come far too late. He _liked_ people. He did.

Though he’d make an exception for Grant bloody Tompkins, who must have been specially chosen for this task. The man had the persistence of the Terminator, the competitive streak of an Olympic hurdler, and the imagination of a bread sandwich, which made him very difficult to throw off the scent. Above all, Tompkins wanted to _win_ , and as far as he was concerned, the scalp of one A. J. Crowley was his golden ticket.

And at the very moment that the Reverend Kanu was praying for Aziraphale, Crowley realised that he must have dropped his phone. His blessed phone. His phone that he’d become very, very attached to, not just because it was sleek and shiny and as powerful as a small laptop, but because it was his final line of retreat in an emergency. All the time he’d been running, he’d kept reasonably calm because as a last resort, he could call his secret landline, the one that no-one ever called, and end up safely ensconced in the base-unit of a rather dated cordless phone, under a cupboard in his pristine kitchen in Mayfair, until Aziraphale popped by to let him out. And then they would put their feet up, pour themselves a glass of something chilled, and have a good laugh about it. Ha.

It was all too much bad luck to be written off by chance. Crowley considered the possibility that he’d been stealthily blessed (though surely, that would have hurt more), or simply that the famed luck of the Devil was being diluted out by the presence of so many vicars. Well, when one’s luck ran out, one must rely on one’s wits. _Nil desperandum._

The reason he’d settled on the Zoo was simple: it was one of the few places in London where you might get away with turning into a snake.

\----------

Crowley scrambled over the fence that separated Regent’s Park from London Zoo, and let himself drop into an enclosure holding a trio of bemused tapirs, to a series of exclamations and objections from the visitors’ side. No doubt this rash act would precipitate a serious security alert, which was fine by him, since as far as he knew, no-one in London Zoo was armed with a litre or so of weaponised holy water. Triumph in a charity water-pistol tournament was not worth the amount of trouble an ordinary person would get into for following him here. No-one would have the demented focus to do it; not even the most competitive acolyte of disruptive technology would risk probable arrest in this cause…

…apart from Grant Tompkins, of course, who effortlessly got over the fence that Crowley had scaled by hastily-disguised levitation, then took the ten-foot fall with a creditable roll, to the gasps of the watching crowd. This was only to be expected. By this time, Crowley felt that he’d known the man for decades, but happily their acquaintance would not last very much longer.

He headed for the Reptile House, breathing a little more freely. Humans were very good at convincing themselves that they hadn’t just seen a man _vanish_ , or become impossibly narrow, or turn into an embarrassed-looking serpent, because that would mean they were mad — but if you did it in front of enough of them together, they might start conferring, and that was a recipe for disaster. On the other hand, a reptile house was nice and dark, and if someone saw an inexplicably-escaped snake, there might be a bit of screaming, but then the keepers would be called, and Crowley would be coaxed into a canvas bag (he would go quietly), and taken off somewhere that crazed data analysts armed with pints and pints of holy water would find it hard to follow.

Right now, that sounded fantastic; he’d handle the aftermath later. He was thirty seconds away from sanctuary. Thirty seconds away from the double doors of the Reptile House…

…that were locked, firmly but politely, along with a whiteboard bearing a cartoon of a snake, a lizard, and terrapin, all looking apologetic. Mr. Lizard explained that after a check of Mr. Ball Python’s enclosure, it had been necessary to bring forward Monday’s routine sweep for snake mites; Mr. Terrapin said not to worry, though, because everything was going to open up again at 3.30 sharp.

This was it. He was going to be obliterated. Never mind Hastur, Fate itself had it in for him. Crowley yielded to no-one when it came to bloody-minded optimism, but even so, he could feel it running out of him like sand.

He’d better keep moving, before the last grains of it abandoned him. He changed both direction and gear with inhuman speed and strolled past the gorillas, and then the bearded pigs, at a rate far faster than a strolling human should be able to go. He took a hard right around the mongooses. Much like Grant Tompkins, they were hard creatures for Crowley to fool — they knew a snake when they smelled one, and set up a hungry racket as he passed. From the corner of his eye, he could see an ominous figure just rounding the corner of the Parrot Enclosure, pretending to chamber his RogueWave and grinning like a maniac.

Crowley snapped his fingers, just in case he expired feeling even more stupid than he did already, for not having tried it. Of course it didn’t work.

And then he saw it. All nine foot of it, as bright red, foursquare, and glossy as if it had been freshly miracled into being between the Parrot Enclosure and Penguin Beach. Which it hadn’t. The powers that were contending over the fate of Crowley were too complex and unstable for that; shake up Heaven, Hell, and Chaos, and the only things guaranteed about the resulting cocktail is that it will be very expensive, and won’t have a twee little umbrella stuck in it. In fact, the phonebox had been there for years and years. London Zoo was very proud of its phonebox, which was a rare model, a (rather small) listed building, and in full working order.

Crowley leapt into it like Dracula into a forgotten coffin of native soil, and yanked the door shut behind him. It had been too long since he’d used one of the blessed things; did they even still accept coins? Cards? Not that it mattered. Crowley willed the telephone into submission, punched the keys with slippery fingers, and sagged with relief when the number started ringing, shortly before a furious, meaty fist started banging on the glass.

\----------

This was _It._ Grant Tompkins could taste it in the air. This was finally It.

This was Victory.

From behind the door of the ancient phonebox, Tony Crowley stared back at him, one hand holding the receiver to his ear, listening intently. Tompkins would probably have said that Crowley’s other hand, white at the knuckles, was holding onto the handle of the kiosk door like grim death — but this was because, because like all humans, he had no concept of how grimly Death could hold onto something when he really, really tried.

Who Crowley could be calling right now was a mystery to Grant Tompkins, but the point was, he was cornered. He was bloody well cornered. He did not have a hope in Hell; he didn’t have a prayer. Triple points to contestant Tompkins.

Whatever Mr. Crowley heard on the phone, he didn’t like it. His eyes went gratifyingly wide with panic.

 _Hasta la vista, baby. Say hello to my little friend._ Grant Tompkins wrenched the door open, triumphant, crazed with victory, finger on the trigger.

And then the cheating bugger disappeared.

As his adrenaline surge deserted him, and he became aware of approaching outraged shouts and footsteps, it occurred to Grant Tompkins that all this was going to be extremely tricky to explain.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Me, one week ago: multi-viewpoint chases are good and easy to write.  
> Me, this Sunday: Crowley can’t have _all_ the wine, because I need it.
> 
> Also, I belatedly realised that the 21st of June 2009 was a Sunday, not a Saturday, but what the Hell. And where is the link to the works of Jarvis Cocker? Somewhere in the future, I'm afraid, so thank-you for your patience.


	3. If we get through this alive, I'll meet you next week, same place, same time.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A return to the Eldritch. This week: tfw you have a relationship epiphany whilst locked in multi-dimensional combat in the Outermost Void. 
> 
> This is also the point to admit that this going to make it to 4-5 chapters, and I should probably mention in advance that the tags still hold good. Especially the third-from-last one.

**Technically still the 21st of June, 2009**

**A Place Where Angels Fear To Tread, if They’ve Got Any Damned Sense**

After Aziraphale had stepped through the sweeping branches of a willow tree in Regent’s Park, armed with his wits and the hasty blessing of a bemused vicar, he found himself in a state that angels generally called The Inchoate, and demons, The Place — and which he and Crowley had privately dubbed The Shortcut. Not that Crowley had ever seen it, nor truly knew how unwise it was to venture there. These were not Heavenly dimensions, or even Infernal ones.

These other dimensions officially didn’t exist. Human rumours about them hinted at the likelihood of enountering something that might, to some unlucky spacefarer, resemble a sea anemone crossed with a decaying nebula, just before the bit where their curiously-calm crewmate lays what used to be a hand on their shoulder, and breathes, ‘Isn’t it beautifuuurglugh…’

Which was possible, but only the start of it. You could get _runcinated_ out there.

Even Eldritch travellers like Aziraphale and Hastur went in cautiously. It made the process safer — somewhat — if there was a personalised locator sigil at the spot you were trying to get to. Hastur was notorious for leaving his Yellow Sign in every spot he could conceivably want to visit, to the extent that humans began to notice. Aziraphale, whose own Sign looked like an alto clef on PCP, was more restrained. There was one is his bookshop in Soho, of course. There was one at Clopton Stoke. There was one in a subterranean clay chamber in Timbuktu, whose hereditary librarians Aziraphale sometimes needed to consult, and a few similar facilities in other famed seats of learning. There was a very hush-hush one in the Catacomb of Domitilla, just outside Rome.

And there was one that Aziraphale had long ago inscribed on the inside of Crowley’s clothes-free wardrobe, in an ink not of Earthly manufacture, as the demon had watched him with folded arms and advised him to lay off the C. S. Lewis.

Aziraphale hoped fervently that it was still there. Fervent hope was the best he could do, since angels did not _pray_ , for several reasons. Firstly, even the Seraphim had to concede that when you got down to it, they were God’s staff and thus on the supply side of the business; secondly, angels were supposed to know what to do without hesitation or doubt; and thirdly, because they weren’t meant to _want_ anything, apart from the continual glory of Heaven and the eventual triumph of Good.

But Aziraphale wanted some things very, very badly right now. He wanted to survive, because if he got devoured in The Shortcut, he was no good to Crowley. And he wanted to be in time, because the alternative was unbearable. And so he had bribed a priest — no, he had not _bribed_ anyone _,_ that copy of _The Grete Shyppe of Fooles_ had been printed for him personally, and every church's Roof Fund needed help — but even so, he feared that the best efforts of the Reverend Kanu weren’t going to be nearly enough. Whatever was after Aziraphale now was clever and hungry and much, _much_ bigger than he was. Whether this was the most appalling ill-luck, or the thing been drawn by the scent of his desperation, it was slowing him down. Under standard abnormal circumstances, ab-reality was so thinly-stretched that you risked coming apart in it, but now it felt viscous, like the goo at the bottom of a pitcher plant.

Aziraphale dropped his reliance on four dimensions, and spread out into the additional ones he needed to properly be H’zr aph’aal. It would make things awkward on re-entry, but he needed to _know_ what was after him.

Eeurgh. No, he didn’t. It wasn’t after him, it was already around him, a multi-dimensional teratology that caught him in a nauseous embrace. It was a popular misconception among Terrestrial scholars of the arcane that all Old Ones were irrepressibly malign. This was far from the truth. The malign ones were just less horrifying, because they devoured you faster. This one did not use any of the eldritch languages that H’zr aph’aal knew, from Aklo to his native R'lyehi. It just linked itself straight to his thoughts and started making them into its own.

**~ Who ~ breaks ~ our ~ slumber ~ ? Art ~ Thou ~ the ~ dread ~ Caller ~ in ~ the ~ Void ~ ? We ~ have ~ _words_ ~ for ~ Thee ~**

~ _Gosh. No, at least, I don’t think so. I don’t even have an honorific, really. Sorry to disturb you, and if you don’t mind, I’ll just be on my way ~_

The presence searched him through, and found his name as effortlessly as if it had been written on one of those little laminated clips you got handed at book fairs. It found _all_ his names, in fact: all the earthly aliases that he had ever borne, his Heavenly workaround of Aziraphale, his _other_ Heavenly name that now twisted helplessly in the aether like a lotus of pale fire. It discovered that he had been fibbing, very mildly, about the honorific.

**~ Unlucky ~ Child ~ of ~ Abhoth. You ~ are ~ sick. Who ~ forced ~ a ~ form ~ on ~ you ~ ?**

_~ My own choice, actually ~_

**~ Not ~ a ~ wise ~ one ~**

A twitch of disgust. Already, H’zr aph’aal couldn’t tell who it belonged to, and he felt himself eroding at the margins. Out here, he was Not-self. He was _dinner_. Not a feast, but he’d do at a pinch. It would take his mind first, and then the rest of him, and since deliveries were rare out here it would take its thrifty time about it. He reminded himself that it was not evil, any more than a pitcher plant was evil…and then he thrashed and thrashed to be free.

**~ Be ~ still. The ~ plague ~ lies ~ heavy ~ but ~ we ~ are ~ your ~ cure ~**

_~ You know, in that case, I might be contagious,_ H’zr aph’aal pointed out. _Why take the risk ~ ?_

**~ You ~ cannot ~ harm ~ us. You ~ chose ~ us ~ in ~ the ~ moment ~ you ~ chose ~ a ~ form ~**

Crowley, I’m sorry, thought H’zr aph’aal in confusion, and then more clearly: Crowley!

What was the human phrase? Oh, yes: get a grip.

If there was one Biblical claim that H’zr aph’aal firmly believed, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, it was that God So Loved the World. Eldritch though he was, he believed it like a zealot, because he could sense it himself. It was the reason he had volunteered his services to Heaven, and why he had been on its books ever since.

**~ Traitor ~ to ~ your ~ nature. ~ Be ~ still. ~**

God loved that little green-and-blue marble _so hard,_ loved it in ways that had troubled H’zr aph’aal when he first noticed them, in case his fellow Abominations could trace them too. But he had never met another case like his own. And here he was, playing for time, in a place where time was very hard to measure.

_~ Remind me again, what is the nature of Abhoth ~ ?_

**~ That ~ his ~ spawn ~ shall ~ be ~ numberless ~**

God loved the world with such focus that H’zr aph’aal could feel it from a couple of dimensions away, slicing through the Inchoate like wire. He could feel it even now, a filament just out of his grasp. If he flailed and struggled he might land on it by chance, but he couldn’t risk dragging the attention of some horror like this the the direction of God’s fragile reality.

Not even for Crowley's sake could he risk that — though for Crowley, he would risk everything he had, and everything he was. It was getting harder and harder to think properly.

_~ And what is the Blessing of Abhoth ~ ?_

**~ That ~ no ~ two ~ of ~ them ~ shall ~ be ~ alike ~**

_~ One might conclude,_ observed H’zr aph’aal, _that since no two of Abhoth’s spawn can be alike, and since we are numberless, sooner or later, something like me was bound to turn up. Just a matter of statistics, really. Not anyone’s fault. Not my choice or yours ~_

**~ Be ~ still ~**

There was no personal risk H’zr aph’aal would not take for the demon Crowley, and in what could well be the the most belated conclusion ever reached by a thinking being, the angel suddenly understood _why._

And then he could sense it: a miniscule galaxy, suspended several shifts of reality away, threaded like a bead on the intent regard of God. He could sense it the way a man at the bottom of an immensely deep well might see an immensely distant star.

**~ Be ~ still ~**

He _was_ still, for a moment that felt like an aeon. Getting the angle right for one’s Sign was a knack, like picking the lock of your own front door: you had to get all the strokes of it to align just _so,_ and in multiple dimensions. He would not get a second chance at this. He might not get a first. He filled his mind with an interlocking pattern of doors that looked curiously like scales: dark, elegant, lozenge-shaped doors, each one edged with bronze, and each one slightly different from its fellows. Then he flipped them all open at once, chose one, and slammed them all behind him, leaving his host combing the void with its frustrated, hungry mind.

Long before they realised that its real name should be Home, humans had given their own galaxy a great many titles — the Silver River, the Milky Way, the Great Fence of the Stars — but H’zr aph’aal had always favoured the choice of the Mesopotamian astronomers who had called it the Snake of the Skies. And in that galaxy, there was a solar system. And in that solar system, there was a planet, and on that planet, there was a continent, and off that continent, there was an island, and on that island, there was a city, and in that city, there was a building, and in that building, there was a wardrobe, inside which the Sigil of H’zr aph’aal was inscribed, in ink the colour of the horizon of the Cerenerian Sea.

Aziraphale emerged, shapeless and eldritch, in Crowley’s empty wardrobe — except that, for reasons that continue to flummox the best metaphysicians of Heaven, and the most subtle philosophers of Hell, no wardrobe is ever totally empty. It took Aziraphale a second or two to pick himself out of the unused coathangers, and by the time he’d finished, he was full of a sick and sinking dread, the sort of Dread that needed a capital letter to describe. But Aziraphale was an Abomination, and he did not yield to Dread. Not for any especially heroic reasons, but because on principle, he did not yield to any being whose name had no apostrophes in it. Dread better be bloody wary of _him_.

Aziraphale was an ocular Abomination. It was one of the reasons Heaven had let him join its ranks, and to be honest it had never felt quite fair — the fact that he was neither vermiform, purulent, nor tentaculate was only a matter of luck. But it was going to be useful now. Still awkward, though. He didn’t usually go for eyes smaller than a pea _,_ nor did he strive for any consistency in colour.

Nevertheless, he made the shift, after taking a quick squint to make sure he ended up as the perfect match for Crowley’s pearl-white carpet. Then he opened the door of the wardrobe a chink, and spilled out of it like stealth tapioca. To use pinhole pupils _hurt_. Each miniature eyeball had a single, fixed focus and you had to keep switching between them; under most circumstances, it gave Aziraphale the eldritch equivalent of a splitting headache.

He didn’t even feel it now, because all he could feel was the sense of being too damned late.

The first thing he saw was fallen leaves.

The first thing he heard was voices, congratulating themselves on a job well done. 

\----------

During the interval between Hastur setting his squad of data analysts on Crowley, and Crowley fleeing in a singularity of panic from a phone box in London Zoo, Hastur’s tame demons had amused themselves by watering Crowley’s luckless plants with the contents of Crowley’s drinks cabinet, and whispering Hell’s little blessings to them: Fire Blight. Black Rot. Phyllody. Mean-spirited destruction was something they did well, and the floor was littered with twisted, rotting stalks.

On the desk sat Hastur’s own handiwork: a plastic bucket, the sort people used for mopping floors, in which a cheese plant was immersed as if it needed bringing round with a good soak. It stood slightly crooked, as if it was holding something down.

Aziraphale’s mass of eyes now lay one layer thick on the carpet, pale and watchful, making no more noise than Death does when Death stands exactly behind you. He had dismissed, as far as possible, everything about himself that was merciful. He needed other qualities from Heaven now. He did not have a flaming sword, nor did he have hands to wield it, but six thousand years on Earth had taught him that one could always improvise. He moved forwards in a way that could have been called inching, if it weren’t so very rapid, and rippled onto the top of Crowley’s desk.

Aziraphale nerved himself to lift the plant, with a motion like a white blood cell engulfing a passing bacillus. Holy water and compost dribbled out of the base of the pot — and the smashed debris of Crowley’s phones bobbed up in the bucket like the Flying Dutchman, trailing sad little wires. He did not allow himself to think about this, not yet. He’d known the sort of thing that he might find.

There is a liturgical tool called an aspergillum, used to sprinkle the faithful with a light rain of holy water. A potted plant was an unconventional substitute, but it would have to do. Aziraphale gave it one experimental swing, holding it by its bunched leaves, and then he was on the move again. Unlucky in every other way, he was lucky in one respect: Hastur had rewarded his aides with the pick of Crowley’s small collection of human art, and it had slowed them down. After the habit of demons, they both wanted the same thing, and Aziraphale could hear the senior fiend ordering them to cut it out and act like professionals. The door to Crowley’s flat stood open, and framed in it was Hastur’s lanky back.

Aziraphale had time to get Hastur twice, once on the upswing and once on the down, spattering him with holy, filthy water. A lot of things happened at once.

There was a _noise._ A noise halfway between a swollen corpse finally ripping asunder, and the bellow of an anguished bull, followed by a stench that would gag a shoggoth. Blisters swelled on Hastur wherever the holy water had struck him, and he stumbled away from Aziraphale as each one ruptured into a pulpy little maw.

“Ouch,” said the Eldritch Duke, in chorus. Threadworms sizzled out of the new mouths, along with smoke that coated everything it touched in a sticky brown film. But only part of Hastur was Infernal. The part that was H’aaztre was a lot harder to take down, Aziraphale had only succeeded in hitting the back of him, and whatever else he might be, the Duke was no coward. As gangrenous flames danced across his back, he shoved his two pure-bred demons down the stairs, and turned to face the abominable angel.

“Too late,” he said, and his grin split him open. Then he lost his hold on his form, and maggots began pattering down the stairs. A pallid, formless horror followed them.

The two junior demons backed towards the front door as the figure of H’zr aph’aal advanced on them, still clutching a cheese plant which quivered slightly in its grip. There was nowhere for them to go. Peaty water dribbled down what might have been the thing's arms, except that there were far too many of them, and the arms had no joints, and it was walking on them too. Somewhere in its trunk, it had created a saucer-sized eye with three or four pupils, but it hadn’t bothered with a head. Or a mouth. Nevertheless, it spoke.

“You should leave,” it advised them, in a voice like something caving in. “You should both leave now”. And then, the most uncanny thing of all, it added, _“Please”_.

It seemed a very sensible request.

\----------

A couple of minutes later, anyone strolling past the main entrance to Crowley’s domicile would have noted that a couple of nervous-looking creative types were manhandling a distressed Chesterfield sofa out of the door of the building. One odd thing about them was that they were both clad in waterproof white boilersuits, and matching gloves, as if they were leaving a crime scene, or were tackling an especially heavy bedbug infestation. One did not keep an apartment in Mayfair to encounter such sights, but the fact that they were there are all was somehow less appalling than the sofa itself.

It _was_ a remarkably unpleasant piece of furniture: mustard-coloured leather with an ugly sheen to it, and buttoned in a pattern that made one’s head hurt. Strands of stuffing or webbing intermittently detached from its underside, plopped to the ground, twisted there for a moment, then collapsed into puffs of ochre dust. The couple — a man and a woman — guided the sofa into a van marked ‘zolto:interior:design’, and drove away, in spite of the fact that both demons were so shaken that they forgot to actually start the engine until they were halfway down the street.

\----------

Aziraphale oozed back into Crowley’s flat, and locked the door behind him. When he was back in approximately human shape, he straightened his back, set down his cheese plant of doom, and steeled himself to look into the bucket. Then he tested the water with a half-formed digit: it was tepid, as if it had been standing for a while in the June heat, but it didn’t seem hot enough for anything in there to have to have melted. Perhaps the burn would be too small to see. Hastur’s people had been thorough. The broken handsets floated beside their smashed base stations, their motherboards drifting like rafts that had launched from a shipwreck too late.

Aziraphale did not know what all these _disjecta membra_ were called, but once he had fingers again, he scooped each one out patiently, piece by piece, onto one of Crowley’s pristine bath towels. Then he found Crowley’s supply of coffee filters, and spent the next few hours filtering the mess in the bucket into the kitchen sink, until he could be certain that he was not going to discard anything that might be important. Every cupboard in the kitchen had been clawed apart in the search for Crowley’s last refuge. The gouges went half an inch deep.

It is a Universal Law that even the most modern designer kitchen must have one drawer stuffed with old tape-measures, stationer’s rivets, broken pencils, candle-ends, fridge-magnets, hole punches, and hardened tubes of glue; flouting this rule will tip off even the spiritually oblivious that there’s something not-human about you. Aziraphale dug in Crowley’s drawer until he found a novelty corkscrew in the shape of a leg, then rapped it on the counter so the illusion broke, and it turned into the spare keys for the Bentley.

He scrubbed the sink the way humans did, but when it came to the carpet and the desk, he lost heart and resorted to miracles. The plants were irrecoverable, all but the one that had been in the bucket. He rolled everything he’d salvaged up in the bath towel, and dug out a leather holdall from under Crowley’s bed, telling himself that next time he saw the demon, he’d give him a piece of his mind for putting him through all this. He made a final sweep of the flat, both to pass the time and convince himself that Crowley couldn’t be anywhere else.

Then he sat in Crowley’s chair, his head in his hands. Since it was summer, it took a long time for darkness to fall, but at 2am, the Bentley rolled through central London at a funereal pace, in utter silence, and squeezed itself into a too-small parking space in front of Aziraphale’s shop like a greyhound into a cat basket. The angel got out, a leather holdall under one arm, and a cheese plant under the other.

Over the next week, he dried out the wreckage of the phones — first on a stack of blotting-paper, then in a sealed cabinet filled with silica gel, and laid everything out in one of the box files he used for books that needed attention from the binders. He knew it was useless, all of it, but he was in the mood to make himself _suffer_.

* * *

**One week later**

“Smashed it all up good and proper, didn’t they?” said Aziraphale’s contact sympathetically, in his own little backroom three floors above a computer repair shop on Glasshouse Street. It was an establishment for which usually-empty boast of ‘computer repair’ was too modest, in much the same way that Aziraphale’s claim to sell Rare and Antiquarian Books was too modest. The proprietor’s skills were expensive, some of them were far from legal, and Aziraphale did not understand them, let alone possess them. Tracking him down had been tricky, and his mannerisms reminded Aziraphale of a certain German occultist from Staufen im Breisgau, who’d been too damnably adept for his own good.

He had done a good job: the memory was readable, and there was, in fact, two messages on it. The first voice, naturally enough, was Hastur’s, with its familiar tendency to slip between pompous and shifty, like an ambassador caught shoplifting:

“ _Before I destroy you, snake, know this: I will punish him in your stead, and without raising my hand. He will mourn you until the end of time.”_

There was a pause. New message. Aziraphale readied whatever passed for his nerves. It had to be done. He didn’t know what he was expecting, but it definitely wasn’t a woman’s frustrated voice, saying:

“ _Oh, poot. Dad, why don’t you ever pick up? It’s not rocket science. Anyway, I won’t be able to make it on Monday, we’ve got compulsory Mindfulness. Yes, yes, I know, but I’ll bring your freezer packs round on Wednesday. Three pasandas, three tuna bakes, and the rest is bolognese, I’m afraid. Make sure you put out the recycling bin._ ”

There was a pause.

“Is that it?” said Aziraphale.

“What were you expecting?”

“I don’t know. Noise. Or silence, of a particular type. Screaming, possibly. Not _this_.”

The modern-day magus was a man who asked no questions and was told no lies. He shrugged at Aziraphale sympathetically, and presented him with a CD of all the information he’d been able to salvage. Back at his bookshop, Aziraphale listened to the incomprehensible last message several times. It made no sense at all, but whatever it was, it wasn’t Crowley.

Still, Crowley had always been all about the human experience — good wine, good conversation and a good night’s kip. With the exception of his beloved Bentley, he’d had little use for physical impedimenta. He’d wished his outfits into being from raw firmament, he hadn’t polished a shoe in six thousand years, and if you squinted very hard at his devilishly expensive-looking watch, you’d see that it was branded _Odegra_. No more little jokes like that.

Crowley, with his almost-human weakness for technology, his almost-human sense of the absurd, his almost-human appetite for sleep.

_Three pasandas, three tuna bakes, and the rest is —_ not silence, thought Aziraphale, but bolognese.

\----------

Of the two of them, it had always been dark, sarcastic Crowley who was the optimist, and mild-mannered Aziraphale who was the fighter. People meeting the angel for the first time often overlooked this, because they were intended to; it did no good to be a thing so Other that it could not even be reasonably supposed to hail from Hell. Everything about Aziraphale’s chosen semblance was over-educated and slightly ridiculous, on Earth as it was in Heaven, although admittedly, each place had different notions of ‘ridiculous’.

But Aziraphale was also someone who’d once stepped forward to personally duke it out with the Devil, with whatever trivial weapon fell to hand (granted, he had gone no further than stepping forward, which was just as well). A surprisingly dirty fighter, for an angel; a surprisingly refined one, for an Abomination. Even if he could lie down and die, he would be disinclined to do so. The temptation was to go back to Clopton Stoke, sink as far as possible into his eldritch nature, and not emerge for decades or centuries. This was a serious risk, and must be avoided. Although the Bible was a mixed bag as a self-help book, Aziraphale recalled that it had had something to say about situations like this —

_To which of the angels did God ever say, “Sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet” ?_

_Are not all angels ministering spirits, sent to serve those who will inherit salvation?_

Pride was forbidden to angels, but Aziraphale still had his dignity. So suggested candidly to Upstairs that if they wanted, he could always go back where he had come from, a great many years before. He got no reply, which was exactly what he’d feared. With no-one at all to witness him, or even to return his call, he pledged his loyalty to Good all over again. He was a little chary of pledging it directly to Heaven.

Then he put Crowley’s empty holdall on his own rarely-used bed, and began to pack.

* * *

Over the course of the next year, Aziraphale became a servant, in a way he had not been for centuries. He went as a lowly ministering angel, among people who entertained him unaware of either of his two natures, which was a good thing in each case, but for different reasons. He went among the imprisoned and mistreated. He heard tales of misery and bereavement. People frequently wept on his shoulder; sometimes they spat in his face. Occasionally they offered him violence and felt a bit funny for a few minutes, after which they found it tricky to recall what they’re been quite so cross about, or with whom.

Because people _were_ cross with Aziraphale, very often. Had he been human, he would have lost count of the three hundred and fifty-eight times he got asked to justify the ways of God to man, a task that to the best of the angel’s recollection had eluded even John Milton. He was told he didn’t know what it was like by a man whose wife had taken years to die of dementia, glumly admitted that this was true, and chalked that day up among his failures. He was bitten on the calf by a small dog in a village outside Chorley, and after some leaping and yelping, he got dabbed with iodine by a woman whose daughter had died in a cycling accident, and left her doorstep with a formal little bow that wrung the first smile out of her in seven months.

He also learned to drive.

Like the death toll of a battle, this bald statement does not convey the courage that was necessary, on the part of some of England’s finest driving instructors, to teach the bookish Mr. Fell, a decidedly mature student, to pilot a car without incident. He learned by increments, the way a human would, with a great stalling and clashing of gears. He declined the suggestion that he might, just perhaps, get on better with an automatic. He only cheated by miraculously avoiding crashes, which was a necessary precaution, and by excising a few of his instructors’ more traumatic memories, which was humane. When his last teacher had congratulated him on passing, wrung his hand a bit too sincerely, and enquired — apropos of nothing — what sort of personal transport her former pupil was considering, Aziraphale only smiled vaguely, and said that a dear friend had bequeathed him a runabout.

That same afternoon, Aziraphale blu-tacked a St. Christopher to the dashboard of the Bentley, for luck. He had done a lot of background reading on all this, he could mentally picture the works of a Type-D gearbox in forensic detail, but even so, when he put the car into second gear, there was a metallic shriek.

“To Hell with it,” he said between his teeth, and possessed the whole transmission, politely but firmly. Things went rather better after that.

The bereaved Bentley took a discreet shine to Aziraphale. For a start, the angel took it to petrol stations, where it basked in admiration like a dowager who can still carry off a pencil skirt. Not that Aziraphale bought petrol, because that would be bad for the valves. But he scrupulously donated tank-filling sums to environmental charities, whilst treating the Bentley to the finest in motor oil, polish, wax, chamois leather, and those little air-fresheners in the shape of a tree. He had no style, but his heart was transparently in the right place. Metaphorically speaking, of course. Everywhere he went, he did good — though people did wonder why anyone would keep a cheese plant on the back seat.

* * *

**June, 2010**

Almost precisely a year had passed, the nights had grown muggy, and still Aziraphale could not bear to permanently return to his shop, where a box file always waited for him like pasteboard Judgement. Clad in short pyjamas, he sat with his feet rebelliously propped on the coffee-table of a motel room outside Manchester, a favourite book across his knees. Aziraphale always kept a window ajar in hot weather, and a moth had blundered in, drawn by the light. The Bentley was safe in the basement garage, disguised as a rather down-at-heel Mondeo.

The angel had riffled through the sachets in the motel’s refreshment basket until he’d found something that claimed to be instant hot chocolate. Its penitential taste suited his reading matter. He was revisiting the work of an old friend.

_Suffering is one very long moment,_ he read, though he knew the words by heart. He’d known them for over a century.

_We cannot divide it by seasons. We can only record its moods, and chronicle their return. With us time itself does not progress. It revolves…_

He sighed, and got up to shoo out the moth. If Aziraphale had chickened out of the Apocalypse, it wasn’t just for the sake of creature comforts. Truth be told, the workmanship on this little Creation was so fine that he had spent years lost in wonder, just at some miniscule part of it. Especially the animals. Having no fixed form of his own, Aziraphale had always been surprised by the religious symbolism Earthly theology accorded to living creatures. Sinuous, intricate snakes were bad, yet doves (he had nothing against doves) were good. Eagles and bulls were good, lions were a mixed bag, lambs were very good, but due to an unfortunate metaphor in the Gospel of Matthew, goats were evil incarnate. Toads, crows, and bats were bad, but so were inexplicable creatures like hedgehogs, cats, and wrens. Vultures were beyond the pale, and in fact, anything that liked pungent food was suspect.

Aziraphale felt a pang of nostalgia for Ancient Egypt, where people at least had the sense to venerate snakes and vultures — and beetles, God’s own hobby. In the Thirteenth Century, the angel had encountered an eccentric Italian friar who’d felt much the same as he did about invertebrates, and recruited the man to his team. His judgement had been sound; the friar went on to become a formidable Saint. You could always tell.

The moth pinged off the lampshade, reeled in the air, and swore.

Not audibly, but vividly. Aziraphale could sense its concussed commentary, zipping about the room —

… _¡blastet! ¡lectrick! ¡bulbs! why.._

… _do thay…_

… _evven haveto exyst wurse…_

… _than candel flamez ever were…_

… _well I guess…_

… _that’s blown my cover then, hasn’t it?_

Aziraphale held out his hand, palm downwards, so the insect could alight on his knuckles, then had to brace his human arm when it did so. No more than an inch across, with grey wings mottled with gold, the moth weighed as much as a prize-fighter. It was not a natural weight, but that of the authority of Heaven. It could have seemed much heavier, he knew. For all Aziraphale’s eldritch _avoirdupois_ that made reality a tight fit, even for a part of him, the moth could have seemed heavy enough to bow him to the earth.

It simply chose not to. Still, it was enough to make a point.

The angel searched his memory, to which he’d committed — amongst other bits of carefully-indexed trivia — the names of all the creatures that humans had ever got around to naming, a pastime he’d picked up in Eden. He came up with a lacy-sounding binomial: _Lobophora halterata,_ in the Order Lepidoptera. A Seraphim moth. At he recalled the name, the moth’s antennae shifted, as if it could hear him reaching his conclusions. Which, of course, it could, though more easily if he gave it full permission.

_Any clearer now?_ He asked.

_Better. Ouch. God is my light, of course, but instinct is hard to control. Haven’t done this for ages._

Aziraphale attempted to formally greet his angelic superior by name in Enochian, as protocol demanded, a process that could take twenty minutes. He drew a blank. The seraph was seemingly innominate, but that was impossible. All angels, even Fallen ones, had a Name. It could be obfuscated, it could be disguised as something more ordinary — and being a description of an angel’s true nature, it could be temporarily carried by another whose own nature was well-aligned. But there was always a Name.

_You have the advantage of me,_ he thought in confusion. _But I like the choice of moth._

_Pfft. Childish stuff. You always did have a soft spot for details, Aziraphale. Printing errors. Typeface oddities. Quirks of nomenclature. I know you of old._

_Should I know you?_

_Let us hope not,_ mused the moth, with a twinge of concern. _Three weeks as an alder-leaf, waiting for the right sort of caterpillar — believe me, it’s tedious. And metamorphosis is no walk in the park. If you can name me after all that, I need to brush up on my tradecraft._

_You shouldn’t be here,_ realised Aziraphale, which a rush of hope that he crushed down with an experience born of practice.

_Says the entity that Heaven had to come up with eight new exception clauses, simply in order to recruit._

_I apologise._ Holding the moth at slightly above eye height, he knelt.

_Get up, you fool. This is a private briefing, H’zr aph’aal._

_Why call me that? You’re not my Dominion._

_No. I’ve come to give you some personal advice. A warning, perhaps._

_Oh dear._

The moth’s antennae quivered again, in what Aziraphale hoped was amusement.

_If I was going to have your eldritch hide, you’d already be in a heavy-duty circle in Heaven, getting banished to some spacetime oubliette. But if you want to disguise the fact that you prayed for a demon, you’ll have to do better than glowing at a vicar and getting her to do it by proxy. You were lucky that I was working security that day._

_You heard me, then?_

_Oh, yes. And again when you made some noble vow to minister to the wretched. Hebrews 1:14, wasn’t it? An eldritch angel-errant. You are an absurd being, Aziraphale._

_One does one’s best. Why didn’t you answer me, then?_

A small silence. _I — I couldn’t think of anything to say._

_I miss him,_ admitted Aziraphale.

The moth shifted its wings irritably.

_Some of us are thousands of years ahead of you there._ The thought was fringed with regret. _I take it that he never described to you how long it took —_

_Never. Tell me._

_Tch. Classified information, H’zr aph’aal. But — long enough. Three steps downwards, and two steps back, all the damned way. You’d better believe that it took a while._

_Have you come to punish me with knowing this?_

_Not I. But you’ve been wandering long enough, angel._

_I’ve been trying to do good._

_Trying?_ There was an odd tone to the exclamation. Pity, almost. Curiosity, almost. Envy — if that were not a trait wholly unbecoming to a seraph.

_I can never be quite certain._

A sigh, like a pulled thread. _That is what I anticipated. Well, well. No wonder you were the one who got to make the choice about the sword._ A pause. _Something is looking for you._

Aziraphale’s hand shook, just a little.

_Don’t torment yourself. I don’t know who this one is. At first I thought it was human, and then I supposed it a being of your own nature. It shifts under observation, it feels weak and burdened, but it does not stop, Aziraphale. I have several times sensed it near your premises, but it could not find you and departed. I cannot get a fix on it, but it seeks you out…_

_What should I do?_

_I don’t know how you feel about your eldritch brethren. Perhaps you like to startle each other for a jape, but personally, I would not care for a surprise visit. No._

_You think I should meet it? On purpose?_

_Since this is not happening — and for a couple of other reasons — I am in no position to give you advice. Good night, Aziraphale._

The angel opened the window fully and the moth launched itself from his knuckles, leaving them smudged with gold.

It was over two hundred miles to London. He’d better make a start.

* * *

**...and Ninthly**

What had happened to Crowley in the time since Grant Tompkins had him cornered in a phonebox, God only knew.

This was because God, naturally enough, knows everything. Whether anyone else could get their head around it was a different question. The fate of A. J. Crowley was a metaphysically knotty problem.

But truly ineffable? Beyond the grasp of any but the mind of God? Perhaps not; that depends on one’s stamina. A really argumentative angel or demon can hold a few thousand separate points of dispute in its mind at once, but research has shown that even humans can tackle arguments that include the phrase, ‘and ninthly…’, if they concentrate.

All right, then. Buckle up.

Firstly: The brute-force belief necessary to power a miracle is, of course, measured in fractional Alps for humans, Everests for a jobbing angel or demon, and kiloEverests for the real heavy-hitters when they are on the Terrestrial plane; outside the Terrestrial plane, attempting to measure them is like trying to weigh a pair of scales using exactly the same pair of scales.

Secondly: Weird coincidences, on the other hand, are measured in Figlocks (Fg.), in honour of one Joseph Figlock, a native of Detroit who in 1937 was struck on the head by a two-year-old boy falling from a fourth-floor window, breaking the child’s fall sufficiently to save him — a challenge for which Mr. Figlock was in good practice, since the previous year he had saved a baby girl in the exact same circumstances.

Thirdly: Prayers offered for a fallen angel, even at one or two removes, are about as stable as gun-cotton welder’s mitts.

Fourthly: Even by the abyssal standards of demons, and the lofty ones of angels, Aziraphale and Hastur were a couple of strange ones. As they had wrestled over the fate of Crowley, dragging into the mix a dose of their native Chaos along with the powers of Heaven and Hell, a coincidence blast of at least 1,850 Figlocks had been generated over London, which is high enough to generate fallout. A dozen people ran into their long-lost twins that day; several gardeners simultaneously pulled up carrots that had grown around their mother’s wedding ring; a depressed civil servant, unwrapping a solitary sandwich on a lonely bench in Whitehall Gardens, was startled by an escaped African Grey parrot that perched on his shoulder, exclaiming “Hello, my lover!” in a voice he’d longed to hear for twenty years.

Fifthly, even if you are the least imaginative man in Britain, if you try to stare down a demon through the door of a phone box in the epicentre of a 1.85 kFg coincidence field, sooner or later you will recall the sheer _strangeness_ of its eyes, chuck in your job in the City, marry the very policewoman who arrested you, and end up as a conceptual artist in Norfolk.

Sixthly: Not even the King in Yellow can mix it with 1.85 kFg. without accidentally sowing the seeds of a pizza joint whose offerings currently include the Cthulhu (squid rings, cockles, laverbread), the Nyarlathotep (dates and beef jerky) and the Yuggoth (Funghi), and which sometimes pops up without warning in the vicinity of Burlington Arcade.

Seventhly: The telephone area code for Mayfair village, where Crowley had his flat, is only one digit away from that of the somewhat less exclusive Patmore Estate in Nine Elms, home of a Mr. Trevor Morrow. It may not have always have been this way, but it is certainly this way now. This is probably just a coincidence.

Eighthly: It is a fact furtively scrawled in the margins of the Book of Eibon that if a Great Old One devours you in a fit of pique, there are going to be side-effects.

Ninthly: In the year that Aziraphale had been wandering, the village of Clopton Stoke had been chosen as the spot for a series of…incantations. It wasn’t the most glamorous location (Highclere Castle had snottily turned the event down) but it was pleasant enough, and conveniently situated for the M3. Despite the fact that most residents of Clopton Stoke regarded the event as a confused, chaotic cacophony, possibly inspired by the Devil or someone even less socially acceptable than that, it couldn’t be denied that it would bring in a tidy bit of cash. And you could always buy earplugs.

A lot of tickets had been sold. A lot of T-shirts had been printed. The date was June the 21st.

It was going to be _fun_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies for putting our eldritch angel through the wringer; he will get his reward eventually, I promise. Canon Aziraphale is probably the most decent and least cool entity in this Universe or any other, but he’s pretty tough underneath it (he was originally an armed guard, after all), and I imagine that even if he believed the worst had happened to him, he would not give in.
> 
> Abhoth is a Clark Ashton Smith deity and I’m not gonna delve further than that into H’zr aph’aal’s origins, because I have never been able to read Mythos genealogies without cracking a grin. Even Yog-Sothoth, the Lurker at the Threshold, He who Knows the Gate and Is the Gate, loses a certain something when you learn that Cthulhu and Tsathoggua are his grandkids.
> 
> Crowley’s flat is largely the minimalist, white-and-black one he has in the book, which is a plausible safehouse for a demon pretending to be a city slicker, in the same way Aziraphale’s shop is a reasonable one for an angel pretending to be a book dealer. I don’t know what to make of Crowley’s place in the TV version, but I guess we can keep the fancy chair.
> 
> Also, I am happy to report that Mr. Joseph Figlock, the original babe magnet, was a real person.


	4. Being Followed Home

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aziraphale, Eldritch angel-errant and Britain’s most law-abiding driver, heads back his bookshop in a quest to find out precisely who — or what — is trying to find him. Also, London’s most devilishly elusive pop-up restaurant has a delivery to make.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The first of two rather expositional, convo-heavy chapters...after a delay that would not disgrace Hell's customer services department. The author apologises.

**June the 21st, 2010**

**An angel at the wheel**

On the drive back to London, maintaining an inhumanly steady 70mph and sustained by a lemon sherbet from a tin he kept beneath the driver’s seat, Aziraphale got into an argument with Crowley. The angel only ever allowed himself to converse with his memories of the demon when behind the wheel. Any more than that would be self-indulgent, in one of the few ways that Aziraphale, whose Angelic status had never tamed his embarrassingly hearty Eldritch appetite, had never been inclined to be. And also because, in some hard-edged way that was foreign to Aziraphale’s nature, the Bentley seemed to recall Crowley too.

Over the past year, as his Magic Tree air-freshener fought a losing battle with leather and lithium grease, Aziraphale had admitted a great many private things in the cockpit of the Bentley, whilst his recollections of Crowley rode almost tangibly in the passenger seat. The demon had laughed incredulously, until the part where Aziraphale had described how, fighting to get through to Crowley’s apartment in time, he had realised that he was not fighting for his life, but for his love. Crowley had been silent for three weeks after that. Then he had quietly, and with as much kindness as a demon could muster, told Aziraphale he was sorry. And then — since memories are shapeshifters, and hard things to kill — he had taken up permanent and uninvited residence in the angel’s mind, patching himself together from all the time they’d spent together over six thousand years, his accent compounded of all the human languages the two of them had ever spoken.

Aziraphale had not consciously willed this memory-being into existence, but he didn’t have the heart to dismiss it. It was Crowley, and yet it was not. It still wanted all of the things that Crowley had wanted. It wanted to drive far too fast, scatter mayhem by the handful, and listen to peculiar music. It wanted to get on Aziraphale’s nerves — really, it took a keener pleasure from annoying the angel than Crowley had himself — but it also wanted to see him laugh. Above all, it wanted to look after him, and in this particular cause, it could get snippy.

 _I don’t like it,_ said Crowley inside Aziraphale’s head, in a voice tuned to the aristocratic howl of the engine. _Why should you do what some miraculous bloody_ insect _told you? You don’t even know who you were talking to back there._

_I have my suspicions. I think they were a seraph, Crowley, and I have to respect that._

_Hah! A bit of top-grade Divinity grabs your attention, doesn’t it?_ replied the demon sourly, and Aziraphale’s vision blinked an unangelic green, just for a second. _The power and the glory, the high-class holy bling? All that refulgence, and wings for miles and miles? Well, let me tell you…_

The voice tapered off, because this was an aspect of the fallen angel’s past that Aziraphale, metaphysical immigrant that he was, knew very little about. When Crowley spoke again, his tone was contrite.

 _Forget I said that, angel, it’s not important. But I’ve got an ugly feeling about this. No, not an ugly feeling. An_ Eldritch _feeling._

_Dear boy, those are my own feelings, and we both know it._

_Well, pay them some sodding attention, then. This mysterious Eldritch_ thing _that’s looking for you, Aziraphale — what if it’s come to take you back where you came from, and no returns?_

_It didn’t sound formidable enough to do that. Not unless I agreed to it, I mean._

There was a pause.

_And would you, angel? Would you agree to it?_

_I don’t know. Perhaps. But you’d come with me, Crowley. You’ll always be with me._

_So what, in Heaven's blessed name, are you worrying about_ me _for? Look out for numero uno. Self-preservation, Aziraphale._

_You’re pretty brisk about that, for someone who doesn’t quite exist._

_I do exist!_ spluttered the demon, indignantly. _You've got a terrific memory, Aziraphale. I mean it. The_ detail _on it, it’s terrifying — or it would be, it it didn’t happen to be yours. I’m sitting on your sofa with a glass of red in my hand, just like old times. I can read most of your books. Even those notebooks you stash in that Very Secret Drawer of your Desk that I’d never dare touch, otherwise. Bloody magic realism; I should've expected it. Didn’t know you had any literary ambitions…_

_You leave those alone, you — you thieving, snaky bastard!_

A burst of fiendish glee. _Too late now._

Aziraphale dropped the Bentley down a gear, and Crowley’s voice grew more serious. _I’m all right, angel. Really, I am. But if you got yourself damaged badly, let alone anything worse, I might have to…go. If there weren’t enough memories to work with. That wouldn’t be so bad for me, but it would be for you. And I don’t want to crash out on you. Not again. Never again._

_Crowley —_

_Just be careful, that’s all._

As the midsummer dawn was unfolding, gauzy and ethereal, the Bentley zipped past Coventry with all the commotion of scissors going through a bolt of watered silk. It was a good thing that no-one observed its progress, or they would have seen the driver having an animated conversation with nobody, and occasionally gesticulating. They might also have wondered why on Earth he kept a cheese plant on the back seat.

\----------

_Just be careful._

Aziraphale scratched the inside of one wrist, and frowned. He was feeling itchy and ill-at-ease in his Heavenly corporation, in a way that never boded any good — and if it starting actually _chafing_ , that meant some serious Weirdness was afoot.

_Careful, Crowley? Hell’s teeth. You magnificent, Godforsaken hypocrite, when in the entire history of Creation were you ever, ever careful?_

— _When it mattered, angel. Only when it mattered._

And then his version of Crowley reminded him, in a rush of memory, that the demon had been more than capable of taking care.

\----------

A decade before, when the two of them had played their desperate ruse against Heaven and Hell, Aziraphale had feared that if the exchange didn’t work, if their guises dropped or failed to shield them from their respective Ordeals, it would be his own fault. Crowley’s corporation was the trademarked property of Hell, whereas Aziraphale’s corporation was the property of…well, Heaven’s patent office had never fully worked out the IP on that one. Whilst its outward appearance was unexceptional, the interior was a mass of kludges between the Ethereal and the Eldritch, jury-rigged in a way that Aziraphale had struggled to describe to Crowley until humanity had invented several mutually incompatible designs of electrical socket.

If Crowley’s corporation failed to disguise Aziraphale, he’d be knocked back to his dene-hole in Clopton Stoke, awaiting banishment with extreme prejudice. Heaven would work out the truth, and while they couldn’t kill him they could easily be…careless…about where in the Inchoate they banished him to. ‘ _Anywhere’_ did not even begin to cover it. The Abominable angel was no coward, but the inventive possibilities appalled him — but not as much as the gauntlet facing Crowley.

Because if Aziraphale’s corporation failed to disguise Crowley…well, hopefully Heaven’s furious angels would drag the demon out of it and destroy him with holy water, without any mercy, but fast. Hopefully it would not occur to them to negotiate with Hell and return its renegade, trapped in a living prison that only Aziraphale’s banished presence could unlock.

When Aziraphale had exchanged semblances with Crowley, this dire possibility was all he’d been able to think about. He had raised his objections and Crowley had dismissed them, with that breezy confidence that always braced Aziraphale like a shot of spirits. Even so, the worried angel had left the internals of his corporation covered with the arcane equivalent of post-it notes, and most of the sigils had been to the effect of ‘No Good Will Come of Invoking This’, ‘Or This’, and ‘I Know You’re Tempted, Crowley, But Especially Not This’.

But Crowley, despite his attempts to disguise this unfashionable fact, was quick on the uptake in much the same way that some humans were. The demon’s affinity with unknown technology had been a godsend (all right, a Hellsend), as was the fact that he was well-used to messy working conditions. He had not spontaneously deliquesced Aziraphale’s corporation all over the floor of Heaven’s clinical halls, where it would have done unspeakable things to Heaven’s ducting system.

He had, in fact, been careful.

And if he had been bothered by Aziraphale’s undisciplined metaphysics, he’d been a perfect gentleman about it afterwards. The only visible side-effects of getting so close to the Angel’s uncanny corporation was that Crowley no longer got the apostrophes wrong in ‘H’zr aph’aal’, and that he had developed the tendency to blink. Just occasionally.

It was only then that Aziraphale realised how much he’d also been worrying about…side-effects. Because whatever else the Mythos might be, it was an agent of _change_.

\----------

By the time the Bentley was on the outskirts of London, the itch that had started at Aziraphale’s wrists was crawling over his palms, like a double handful of woolly-bear caterpillars. It had started to get very uncomfortable.

By the time he was within striking distance of Soho, the sensation had migrated into two particular digits, and every time he needed to turn the wheel sharply, it hurt. He knew what _that_ meant. Something weird and changeable. Something unstable, stained with his native Chaos. Something that felt like it had been waiting for for him.

Hastur? Somehow, he doubted it. There was a _reluctance_ to the feeling that was very unlike the Duke's. Great determination without great strength, almost as if it was duty-bound to seek the abomination H’zr aph’aal in spite of itself.

 _By the pricking of my thumbs, Something Eldritch his way comes,_ thought the angel, _though I do wonder what our closing speed is. Because I also happen to be Something Eldritch, and whoever you are, and whatever you are, and whatever appendages happen to serve you as thumbs, I sincerely hope they feel like pincushions at present._

_Because I am also coming your way, you realise. And who can predict what will happen if we collide?_

\----------

**A. Z. Fell & Co., Soho **

The first thing Aziraphale thought, when he got home to a certain hard-used, gum-freckled and trodden-in street in Soho, was that whoever was awaiting him, it was most unlikely to be Hastur. The Abominable Duke had never been much for wholesome exercise — but at this very moment, a bicycle was propped against the window of Mr. A. Z. Fell's bookshop. Against the _actual window_ of his actual shop. Apart from the sheer discourtesy of it, that should have been impossible. The shop was not only warded, it was also and very deliberately the dullest shop in the whole of London. It radiated tedium.

Aziraphale hadn’t come up with this dodge himself. He’d discovered it courtesy of Martin Farquar Tupper, after failing to shift a single copy of the worthy Victorian poet’s Proverbial Philosophy for fifty-seven years, and eventually wondering _why_. A little experimentation led to the discovery that certain books were Teflon to human curiosity. They were, quite literally, miraculously dull tomes. Edmund Spencer’s Faerie Queene was particularly good, but the power was also strong in Ethan Frome, Ivanhoe, The Diary of A Country Parson, and every single novel by a British politician, from Disraeli to Anne Widdecombe.

A windowful of that lot in a Soho bookshop, and anyone who knocked on the door would have to be some sort of boredom fetishist. Since Aziraphale had been away for a while, he’d prudently reinforced his defences with Potatoes of Argentina, and something by Henry James. And yet, here was this bike.

The intruding velocipede wasn’t even on a kickstand. It wasn’t the sort of conveyance to have anything as stuffy as a kickstand. Or gears. Or a puncture repair kit with leatherette straps.Or a saddle, barely. It was so exaggeratedly built for speed that if you looked at a bike like that head-on, you’d just see a pair of drop handlebars, floating three feet above the ground. And it was leaning shamelessly against the glass, as if this was an acceptable arrangement, and not a crime punishable by forever getting inexplicable double punctures when it was raining and the last bus had left ten minutes ago.

Aziraphale pursed his lips in displeasure. Angels did not _curse_ people, not even people who did things like this. It was, as his Dominion would have said, off-brand.

Furthermore, no curse would have worked on the furtive-looking young man who was now standing next to the errant bike, as if he'd made a snap decision to be noticed and thought he might shortly regret it. As Aziraphale drew the Bentley up at the kerb, got out, and extracted his cheese plant from the backseat, the man looked up from his smartphone and rippled in panic, as if he were standing in a heat haze. Very briefly, he appeared to have long canines, and something like a muzzle, but apart from that there was nothing terribly outlandish about him; he was just an ordinary demon wearing cycle shorts, a vest, and a garish boxy backpack emblazoned with the word VoraCity™, and under it, in smaller letters, Eat All The Things. Aziraphale also concluded that he must also be an enthusiast for Bosch, since he had The Garden of Earthly Delights tattooed up and down both arms. No matter the circumstances, it was refreshing to meet someone who appreciated human art. And something about the slightly vulpine face was familiar.

Oh, yes. _Now_ he remembered him.

Hastur’s sharp lad — and if he hadn’t made a dash for it by now, he must be on some errand too vital to allow for minor interruptions like free will and self-preservation, since last time the two of them had met, Aziraphale had been staring down a flight of stairs at him, clutching an improvised holy-water sprinkler and looking like something that would have given H. R. Geiger sleepless nights.

Aziraphale waved politely at the Bentley, which Crowley had long ago trained to ignore the fact that it didn’t have central locking. Then he held out one hand in greeting, which caused the demon to back away from him until he was pressed up against the window of the bookshop, holding up a large, flat box as if it could ward the Eldritch angel away. Suddenly, Aziraphale realised that his other hand was still gripping the cheese plant, rather meaningfully.

There is a traditional phrase uttered when attempting to face down entities as Other as Aziraphale, and curiously, it is exactly the same in Hell as it is on Earth. No-one knows what Heaven’s own phrasebook suggests, but it’s probably along the same lines, just more polite.

“You've got to be fucking kidding,” whined the demon, in a tone of resignation. “It’s _you_ , isn’t it? The Cheeseplant Avenger, in what passes for the flesh. Got a nasty feeling when I was told to pick up an order, but I told myself it won’t be for him, of course it won’t be for _him._ Even I can’t be that blessed, and there are eighty-two Abominations on Hell’s books, each of them weirder than the last — ” The demon broke off, and shrugged. “Oh, well. More fool me. If you give me time to send a text, it’d be appreciated. I’d hate Mal to think I bottled this one.”

Aziraphale thought so rapidly that sparks danced through his hair. Something Eldritch this way comes, indeed, but via divine and infernal intermediaries.

“You were expecting someone else?” he asked.

“I was expecting an Eldritch contact, sure. I was not expecting _you._ Malacoda said we needed info that only an Abomination could provide, but she ran the portents and apparently there was someone who’d be willing to meet us, Earthside and very hush-hush. We assumed it’d be a demonic Abomination, since, y’know, there’s only one Abominable angel in the known Universe. Still risky as fuck, but anything for the Yellow Duke. Mal warned me that the contact would want something in return. She — she somehow neglected to mention it might be my own blessed existence.”

The demon’s expression was that of someone calculating their chances of merely getting discorporated, versus going up like a chunk of white phosphorous. Aziraphale set down his plant, reached out, and took the pizza box away from him; it was still warm. He could see that the insides of the demon’s arms were quite recently tattooed, coarsely and functionally, over the elegance of his Hieronymus Bosch sleeves — not with pictures, but with script. The angel tilted his head to read it.

“Your name is Vulx…you have sworn a binding oath…you have sworn a binding oath to find your master.” He stopped in surprise. “The oath is duplicated.”

“Yeah, Malacoda has the other half. You met her too, though not in the best of circumstances. She’s the brains of the operation, I just do the recon. And also — how the fuck can you read _that_? I thought it was deprecated for angels to speak the Infernal tongues. _Highly_ deprecated.”

“I only have written knowledge,” said Aziraphale, defensively.

The demon Vulx lowered his hands, and raised a pierced eyebrow.

“Casuistry, angel? _Really?_ ”

“I believe Heaven was first to come up with that one.”

Vulx grinned, exposing a wider variety of teeth than a human grin should. “Yeah, _that’s_ more like it. That’s the stuff I was waiting to hear. You’re some weird excuse for an angel, Mr. A. Z. Fell. Not really one of _them_ at all, are you? You’re more like the Yellow Duke, except he had more edge to him. Let’s hope he still does. But you’re a clever old monster, under that prissy suit. And now I’m wondering if Malacoda wasn’t on the money after all.”

He held out his phone, on which there was an image of a coin, heads-up. It showed no human monarch: the head was goatishly bearded, crowned with vast horns. The demon tapped the screen, and the coin spun, landing on the reverse side: a dancing fiend with the legend CIVITAS DIABOLI.

“This was Mal’s idea. Bit of a work-around, but you can make an app for some very strange things, these days. Spin a coin inside a coincidence field, and…”

“…it’ll come up all heads. Or all tails?”

The demon looked at him pityingly. “If it was that easy, humans would have been all over it long ago. It does quotations in binary. Generally, it’ll be some famous quote, but we’ve had everything from song lyrics to Ikea manuals. Mal’s nailed most of its tricks by now, and built some conversion tables. And I calculate we’ve been brought together by…”

“…about 500 Figlocks, give or take ten percent. Started feeling it a bit past Twickenham.”

“Huh. A natural sensitive, just like the Yellow Duke. That must be handy.”

Aziraphale shook his head. “Honestly, it’s a distraction, most of the time. It’s not as if one can ever tell what’s going to happen, or how. Generally it’s about as useful as it’s been just now, because just as you weren’t expecting _me_ , I really thought that I’d be meeting someone — ”

“Someone Eldritch? Someone of your own sort?”

Aziraphale had never quite got accustomed to the fact that both angels and demons, unable to cope with Eldritch taxonomy (an admittedly complex subject), lumped all the demented variety of Abominations that the Outermost Void could spawn under the blanket heading of ‘your sort’. He nodded, as politely as he could.

“Sorry to disappoint you, your Holiness. If it’s any consolation, I had to volunteer for this craptastic job just to get back up here, after — after our last meeting. Been at it for six months. It’s a whole new curse of modern tech, still in beta testing. Bit of a throwback if you ask me, but downstairs, they’re all agog for it. Call it the gig economy.”

 _Crowley,_ thought Aziraphale. _If you were here, you'd either be working on this — or trying your level best to avoid it._ “And…does it have potential?”

“Well, I really, really hate it, so I’d say yes. Look, d’you want this pizza, or not? It’s got oysters on it. And…grapes? I’m not much for pizza rules, but you have some fucked-up tastebuds.”

“Would it surprise you to learn that I did not, in fact, order any such thing? But under the circumstances it seems unwise to refuse delivery. Unless someone has added a dusting of hellfire.”

“Mate, it’s just a pizza. Swear it on my Fall.”

Vulx shuddered, and the pavement smoked beneath his cycling shoes. To swear falsely on one’s Fall was to risk reliving it, and even to swear truly was far from enjoyable. Aziraphale knew that demons used this oath to get around the problem of trust in an organisation whose CEO was officially the Lord of Lies, but being an angel, he had only seen one other demon do it. That demon had been Crowley, on the day he had proposed the Arrangement nearly a thousand years ago, standing on flagstones that had become a minor tourist attraction for the footprints he’d left in them. Aziraphale might be pure of heart, but he wasn’t inexperienced. This was the closest a fiend could come to a pledge of good faith, and they did not undertake it lightly.

“It seems to me that we might have things to discuss. Won’t you come in?”

Vulx made a low growl, took one step forward, hesitated as if fighting some unseen internal battle of wills, and then took one step back again, looking oddly disappointed in himself. “No offence, but I — I’m not gonna accept a threshold invitation from _you_. Even for this.”

The demon divested himself of his VoraCity™ backpack, and plonked himself on the stairs on the shop, with all the ease of someone who’s decided to voluntarily sit on carpet-tacks. Aziraphale sat next to him, the open pizza box across his knees. He was just about to do something about how odd this would all look to passers-by — a short-lived pop of invisibility should do it — when the demon shook his head scornfully and pulled down an illusion like a roller blind, ensuring that anyone who passed would see two shabby figures sitting in a heap of cardboard, sharing a bottle of cider. That was clever: infernally so. Better than true invisibility. No-one would bother them now.

Aziraphale picked up a slice of pizza, and took a cautious bite. Heat flared across his palate, his eyes watered, he gasped, and reflected that this was the stupidest conceivable trick to fall for. He wondered how much it would hurt and what damage it would do.

\----------

Then he steadied himself. It _was_ good pizza, if only they’d gone a little easier on the chillies. The angel resisted the temptation to miraculously summon a glass of milk. The demon watched him, his expression divided four ways between surprise, mockery, wariness, and — was that hope?

“Holy shit. You actually _trust_ me?”

“As far as I could throw you.”

Vulx switched to a more familiar demonic expression: the side-eye. “Yeah, let’s not test that out.”

Aziraphale braced himself, and took another bite. It wasn’t so alarming once you knew what to expect.

“This really is excellent, you know, if a bit aggressively seasoned. I expect you’d enjoy it.”

A wary pause. “Pleasure is for entrapping humans. None of us lot need to eat.”

“True, but I think you’ll find the procedure has its points.”

A short, yelping laugh.

“Are you trying to _tempt_ me, you weirdo? You blessed well are, aren’t you?”

“I had a good teacher. Well, an expert teacher, anyway.”

“You are the strangest angel in the entire fucking firmament.” The demon took a slice of pizza and made a series of discoveries about capsaicin and stretchy cheese, inadvertently becoming a fraction more human himself. Twenty seconds passed while he processed the concept of a taste explosion, then he made a face, spat out a cooked grape, and grew serious. “You must be, because you let us live. Me and Malacoda — you let both of us live. And we’d helped destroy your friend.”

 _Your friend._ Aziraphale did not bother to deny it. “I remember.”

“Why’d you it? Or not do it? I’d have done it like a shot. Most humans would have, believe me. And you’re a Principality, technically. Me and Mal should be vermin to you.”

“It wouldn’t have done one bit of good.”

Vulx considered this statement on several levels, then scoffed after the manner of his kind. “You don’t actually _forgive_ us?”

The pause that followed was like an icicle being sharpened to a courteous point. “Would you like me to? Formally, I mean?”

“Shit! I take that back. No, no I would _not._ Please. I really do not want to be forgiven by anyone, for anything. Ever.”

“Consider yourself unforgiven.”

The demon took another slice, and wolfed it down nervously, grapes and all. “You’re an outlier, is what you are. Hell’s Abominations are one thing, but there shouldn’t be any such thing as an Abominable angel. I worked for the Yellow Duke, and you’re not right, even by those standards. Can your lot go mad?”

“My lot? Angels, you mean, or — ”

“Both.”

“Abominations can turn on themselves. Become nothing but appetite. They devour themselves and anything that gets near them. No-one knows what they want, or even _if_ they want. Perhaps it’s a sort of bliss.” He shuddered. “Unspeakable things exist.”

“Unspeakable? As in Hastur, the Unspeakable?”

“Oh, _honestly_. Since we’re discussing Hastur by name, he’s clearly not quite as Unspeakable as he likes to advertise. Not even by the standards of Hell is it a desirable title.”

A snort. “He wouldn’t like to hear _that_ , and specially not from you. Couldn’t take a human semblance for months, after what you did. Ever seen three million maggots all throw up at once? Malacoda and me had to squeegee ichor off the walls.”

“I’m not sorry for that, you know. Not one jot.”

“Ha. If you were, I really would think you’d gone barmy. Can angels even go barmy? Proper angels, I mean,” said the demon. Tact was never Hell’s strongest point.

Aziraphale was caught off-guard. The answer to this question was something had had never openly discussed, even with Crowley. Aziraphale had not been present at the Fall, which had unleashed so much arcane power that it was detectable many dimensions away, along with flurries of insanity that had drawn the hungry attention of anything eldritch, H’zr aph’aal included.

As he had followed one such trail, a mass of wounded wings had barrelled out of space and embedded itself in one of his sides, weeping in a language he did not recognise, though he knew many. Neither had H’zr aph’aal known at the time that it was an angel, one of those who never defied God but in a single way: each had shattered themselves trying to break another’s Fall, then fled from pillar to post through space, calling out a name that no longer had an owner.

Briefly, the Abomination had wondered if he should devour his find at once, or leave it to soften up a bit.

But then the creature had groaned out the name again. So H’zr aph’aal had scooped it together, clumsily, spilling feathers into the void. It was only after a while that he’d noticed that if he didn’t bat those lost feathers away, they stopped twisting and pointed a particular direction, drifting slowly, before they fell apart. So, he followed them. It took so long that he ended up having to ration the feathers, and when he returned the angel to its own reality, still demented with grief and past the restorative powers of all but the Almighty, the whole business had caused a stir. H’zr aph’aal had been offered a contract, which was highly irregular, but God’s rules had always been surprisingly clear on this. _Angelus est nomen officii:_ ‘Angel’ is a job description. H’zr aph’aal had tracked down broken angels one by one, and returned them to Heaven. It had taken a long time.

“Angels can lose themselves,” he said carefully. “Get into states that only God knows the way back from. And they are never quite the same — ”

Not because God could not undo their grief utterly, but because to do so would in some way be akin to a theft. But there was no way to explain this to a demon.

“Right,” sneered Vulx, “I guess even tea and sympathy has its limits. Well, demons can go mad too, and when that happens, it’s not pretty. Full-body paranoia. Usually we lock them up until either they snap out of it, or they take themselves to pieces. But you can’t do that with something like the Duke, he can take himself to pieces and put himself right back together again. I think all you Eldritch lot are a bit cracked, you know, not that that’s a criticism. But this was different. That’s why I asked you if — if any of you can lose it for real.”

“Hastur went mad?” asked Aziraphale.

“Maybe. Hard to say. Got into trouble, he did. Said things he shouldn't. Got us _all_ into trouble.”

“The sort of trouble I might have answers about?” Aziraphale frowned. “Where exactly is Hastur now? And why is it your particular task to help him?”

The demon looked unhappy. Tattoos squirmed under his skin. “Good questions. I was hoping you might help us out with the first one, not that any of the answers can be good. As for the second? Hastur had a team in Hell as well as Earthside, back when he was undercover as a marketing maven. Me and Mal were both in on it. Leroy Jaune, guerilla marketeers extraordinary. It was all going _swimmingly_ , as you’d say. Commendations galore, we were going to get a whole broom cupboard allocated to us — until the Duke chucked the whole operation to kill one blessed demon, and ordered us to help him. Now we’re tainted by association.”

“Nevertheless, it was more than risky to come here. It was quite impressively loy —” he stopped himself just in time, “ — stupid. You’ve got some nerve.”

Aziraphale was a nice person, he really was — nice in both the new and the antiquated sense of the word — but he was also one of the world’s more seasoned manipulative bastards. For all Crowley’s brash assertions, it was all too easy to spook a demon, just by implying that just for once, in spite of thousands of years of brutal experience, it might be in their interest to trust an intelligence other than their own.

He took a breath. Wiped his greasy hands on his pale cream trousers, which would be ruined by this vulgarity, no doubt, but something already told him this wouldn’t matter for very much longer. And besides, they really did have to make a move. Vulx was no slouch at defensive illusions, but a five hundred Figlock coincidence field was not easy to fool, and the thing had been following Aziraphale about like a personal raincloud ever since he got back to London. Out of the corner of his eye, the Eldritch angel had seen two serendipitous meetings of long-lost acquaintances so far. To add awkwardness to unlikelihood, one pair had even run into each other going in and out (respectively) of Intimate Books.

He and Vulx should seek cover, before someone marched up to A. Z Fell & Co. with the lost works of Suetonius under one arm, trying to score a free valuation.

“Perhaps we should discuss this inside — ”

“Said the spider to the fly. If I go in there, angel, where will I come out, and in how many bits?”

Aziraphale realised he was pulling the holier-than-thou expression that angels tended to pull at the suggestion they might be capable of nastiness, and that this was unfair of him. By human standards, he _was_ fastidiously, even comically couth. By Heaven’s standards, he was about as couth as a silver knuckleduster. Hell’s operatives had every reason to regard an angelic Abomination with caution.

There had only ever been one exception to that rule.

“It’s demon-safe,” said the angel, as reassuringly as he was could. “Tested quite extensively. And as I said, you’ve evidently got some nerve.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I tried to keep Hastur’s demonic minions from making further appearances. But stupidly, I had already given them names even though the names didn’t appear in the story, so they kept pushing back. Backroom tech Malacoda is from the Inferno, though originally male, and Vulx is…well, it’s tough to find names of jobbing demons. They all tend to be Princes, Earls, and Dukes, unless you look to John Dee, whose cacodemons have such user-friendly handles as Rrl and Xdz (I _wish_ Enochian was a functional language, but it just ain't). So, Vulx is a pronounceable compromise.
> 
> The coinage of Hell shown by Malacoda’s app exists, more or less: in 1973, an eccentric Danish clerk called Knud Langkow embarked on a multi-decade prank where he cross-dressed as a Satanic High Priestess called Alice Mandragora, and left specially-made infernal coins stamped CIVITAS DIABOLI at various places around the world. None of his colleagues or family had a clue about his odd hobby until after his death, and he was only discovered to the the author of the stunt in 2013. We should all be a little more Alice Mandragora.


	5. I'll see what I can do

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Aziraphale makes a rash vow to the demon of the Gig Economy, finds out more about the human whose ambition seems to be to track down an Eldritch Abomination and give it a talking-to, and discovers it's too late to get a refund on that half-bottle of 1959 Chateau Musigny.

The demon Vulx, minion of the gig economy and Patron Fiend of dubious sportswear, was not keen on angelic lairs, and even less so on Eldritch ones. He was, however, not only desperate, but inquisitive. Aziraphale had dispelled every piece of Angelic warding on the bookshop before his eyes, and the place _still_ held as much interest as a tasting menu for wallpaper paste. The demon badly wanted to know how the trick was done, and as John Maskelyne had taught Aziraphale long ago, that was the crunch point for any conjurer. One must choose either to retain one’s mystique, or to gain a pupil; to fob the enquirer off (the safe option), or reveal the simple truth (the dicy one). It was not a day for safe options, and Aziraphale had explained his book-based curiosity repellant.

“…so as I said,” he finished, “it consumes no miraculous power whatsoever. And entirely innocuous — unless you’re allergic to boredom.”

Vulx’s curiosity was piqued. Sensing an advantage, Aziraphale resorted to the one weird demon-wrangling trick that had always worked on Crowley: respect. Demons might loathe praise and suspect flattery, but they _hungered_ for respect, fought for it and stole it, would sate themselves on envy, fear or loathing as a substitute for it (God forgive them, Aziraphale thought, they actually preferred the substitutes). In one of those inversions peculiar to demonic reasoning, even contempt and disgust could serve in a pinch, but Hell kept them on short rations, even of these. Enough genuine respect to satisfy one human soul would give a demon dyspepsia. It was like putting Gentleman’s Relish on toast; a skim of it was more than enough.

Aziraphale got to his feet, and took one discreet step back from the door of his own shop.

( _Don_ _’t be terrifying,_ he told himself, for the hundred thousandth time in his weird existence.)

“Why don’t you try it for yourself?” He paused for three-fifths of a second _(don_ _’t be terrifying, don’t be terrifying)_ , then smiled. “After you.”

All smiting aside, it was possible for an Abomination to dismantle an ambitious but low-ranking entity like Vulx. Not fast, or neatly — but it was possible, and both of them knew it. Aziraphale was sure that Hastur, in his more virulently Yellow moods, had described the process in detail. Vulx went very still, processing the odds of an ambush against his need for information. Then he shrugged, as if he didn’t like the odds but would play them anyway, and then he went in, followed by Aziraphale. The gossamer illusion created by the window display dissolved like wet paper, and the interior of the bookshop was revealed in all its fascinating glory, arcane knowledge thick in the air, as rich and strange as quince jam.

“Hey! No miracles required. That’s actually clever. Mal would like it.”

The demon scanned the bookshop with a series of snuffling inhalations, checking if anything about its clutter was a Divine miracle. It took him well over a minute, because almost everything Aziraphale owned was its unfeigned self, and also because everything he owned had some history to it. Crowley had once pointed out that it wasn’t consistent to use the term ‘antique’ when the Eldritch angel was older than anything that belonged to him, putting a curious emphasis on that _anything._

And Aziraphale had replied: _dear boy, I concede it, I am an ancient artifact_. And they had left the question of his vintage at that.

The angel ran a fingertip along a dusty shelf; the poor place felt sorely neglected. He snapped his fingers, and discreetly vanished the remnants of the pizza box — books and greased cardboard were not a happy combination — then shifted papers from a couple of chairs with a glance. From one corner of the shop came an odd sound, somewhere between a creak and a growl, and the angel’s eyes flicked momentarily to his roll-top Desk, in the way that a dog owner’s will do when they’re thinking about assuring a visitor that their four-legged chum has a lovely temperament, really, he’s just not used to strangers. But the Desk had decided to behave itself, for the time being.

“Take a pew.” Aziraphale clapped a hand to his mouth. “Apologies! Force of habit. Please, be seated. I hope you’re not detecting anything untoward.”

Vulx gave one of his short, nervy laughs, but he was sufficiently at ease to sit down. “As you presumably know, you Eldritch git, you swamp the signal where that’s concerned.”

Aziraphale looked regretful. “A pity. Because, unlikely as it seems, I’ve been credibly informed that someone who might be distantly related to my sort is looking for me. _Hunting_ for me, perhaps. And I thought you might be able to enlighten me, about where that thing is now. Or what it might be.”

“A tip-off from Upstairs?” Vulx widened his tawny eyes. “Well, fuck me sideways. Your Surveillance must be better than I thought. They’re not wrong, though. I’ve seen it for myself. It’s a woman.”

Aziraphale was caught so much off-guard that he forgot to look pained at the swearing. “A _woman_ ? A _human_ woman?”

The demon shrugged. “Well, maybe. She looked that way, but then, so do we. It happened when we got round to stripping the flat for loot — ” he stopped, as Aziraphale winced. “Standard practice. Assets of ex-demons are to be liquidated and transferred to an account in Lichtenstein. It was all Malacoda could do to stop it getting numbered some variant on the old treble-six, ominous sods that they are — ”

“They still use that number? But it’s — it’s just a telephone number. One of the few things that the Book of Revelation actually got right.”

Vulx was looking at him strangely. “Hold it right there. The Number of the Beast is a _phone number_?” It was almost a hungry look, as if he’d been starving for months. “As in, you ring it, and someone picks up and says ‘Hi, Rodney Beast here, and if you’re selling something will you kindly sod off?’ ”

“Apart from the fact that the name wasn’t Rodney, that is more or less as I recall it, yes.”

A long exhale. “You have to understand that officially, _no-one_ downstairs knows that. The true meaning of the Number is secret. Beyond Ultra Classified. Get too nosy, and find out that Dagon ’s idea of brainwashing involves a drill and a squirty bottle of Holy Water. That kind of secret. So, how the everliving fuck do _you_ know it?”

“Tell me about the woman. I did ask first.”

“If I must. Like I said, there was a skip for stuff that wasn’t worth pillaging. And that’s where this blessed woman was, in cargo shorts and a tie-dye T-shirt, covered in drywall and digging through the skip with her bare hands. Pretty determined, too. When I snapped my fingers and suggested she piss right off, she lobbed a flatscreen at me and swore in some weird language. Brought me out in a rash.”

Aziraphale had a weakness for people who paid no attention to the odds. “What made you think she was looking for me?”

“I got nosy. Reckoned she was after something specific, and since it was already in the skip it was nothing I’d get a bollocking for leaving, so I went back inside and watched until she found it. It was a wooden panel, smashed into halves, with weird graffiti on it.” He paused again, as Aziraphale silently traced the outline of his own Sign in the air — the Sign he’d inscribed on the back panel of Crowley’s wardrobe. “Yeah. That was the one. When she’d got it, and saw it was broken, she didn’t seem over-happy. Shoved it into a backpack and ran off. D’you know her, then?”

“No. No, I do not. But I feel that I somehow should. Which is strange, because whatever she may now be, I promise I had nothing to do with it. And if she was unwise enough to seek an Eldritch tome through me, I’d have had to disappoint her. My personal collection is _not_ for sale.”

“Maybe she wants your help,” suggested Vulx, “or your protection. Would be a smart move, for a human caught up with your sort of nonsense. Mal acquired an unofficial copy of the Downstairs file on you — this is _sub rosa_ , natch, Dagon would literally disembowel us — after we made it back there with the Duke. You got yourself a reputation, Mr. A. Z. Fell. You talk soft soap, and you fight like filth.”

Aziraphale, who had spent an Eldritch lifetime trying to keep things civilised, decided to take that as one of Hell’s backhanded compliments.

“Anyone who wants my help, may possibly get it. But they still need to ask.”

“Anyone?” said Vulx.

“Possibly anyone,” replied Aziraphale, “if their reasons were both good and weighty.”

After six thousand years of arguing with the Serpent, even the least worldly entity learns something about terms and conditions.

A pause. “We need your help. Me and Malacoda. We need it badly. I’d never have crossed your threshold otherwise.”

“I rather thought that might be the case. Why me?”

“Because you can’t be strong-armed into forgetting something by a big enough miracle. We thought you might actually remember something — and you do, don’t you? You know what the Number of the Beast is, or was. And the rest of those Eldritch bastards Downstairs might know too, but you don’t get to Duke status by being gabby. Or fair.”

“Whereas I have both weaknesses, and am in no danger of Heavenly promotion. All right, I will ask you once again: what became of Hastur, and where is he now?”

Vulx took a deep breath. “Everything about this situation is demented, but here’s how it stands: after that business in St. James’ Park, the top brass said the Yellow Duke made away with Crowley for no good reason. I suspect you know that’s not true. I suspect that you know he had his reasons.”

Aziraphale leaned back in his chair, and thought rapidly and hard. Downstairs was the realm of evil, but of necessity, that evil was bound by Draconian laws. Taken to its logical conclusion, demonic rivalry would decimate the ranks of Hell without the need to spoil a single angel’s manicure. Consequently, killing another demon was an Infernal crime. To double-cross, to envy, to steal another’s credit or engineer their humiliation — all these were demonic virtues. But to slay another fiend was beyond the pale, not because it was dastardly, but because it was counterproductive. There were self-spawning demons whose function it was to be an outlet for such urges. In reality, Hell needed every damned recruit it could muster.

And Hastur, along with Dagon and Saa’itii and Mormo and all the rest of the Abominations who’d signed up Downstairs, had been one of Hell’s respected assets. Hastur could go where the natural denizens of Pandaemonium feared to tread. Hell would not turn on an Abomination like him for no good — all right, all right — for no _understandable_ reason, and yet he had thrown all that away, to eliminate Crowley.

Hastur’s revenge had been savage and underhand. It had also been well-planned and ingenious. The Yellow Duke had known what he had in mind would cause trouble, even for him, and he had done it anyway.

“See, even though no-one can quite remember what happened, you can’t cover up a thing like that completely,” said Vulx, interrupting the angel’s train of thought. “Malacoda could pick up a few continuity errors in reality…”

“She could?” Aziraphale was suddenly anxious for someone he’d seen only once, and under the worst possible circumstances. It hadn’t occurred to him that the demonic technology could have got sophisticated enough to achieve such a feat; this one was too sharp for her own good. Like Crowley. “You need to tell her not to be clever.”

“ _You_ try telling her,” replied the demon earnestly, “’cos I’d like to see you do it, I really would. But these errors were consistent with the form Duke Hastur’s alleged madness took, which was insisting that Duke Ligur was dead, and Lord Crowley killed him. But Ligur’s _there_ , right as ra— as burning hail, and _he_ remembers Hastur, right enough. But Hastur says it’s not really him, that he saw him die. I mean, really die — holy water, the works. That this Ligur’s some kind of impostor. That Ligur shouldn’t be so bloody cheerful, and definitely shouldn’t go swinging through Hell…”

“ _Swinging?_ Through _Hell?_ ” Aziraphale’s grip of modern parlance was just up-to-date enough to make his Eldritch mind boggle.

“Yeah, he can stick himself to walls. And ceilings. Okay, a few of us can do that, but just the easy routes, the ones that haven’t been hosed down in a few hundred years. But Ligur? Mighty Duke Ligur? He goes swinging from the light fittings like bloody Spiderman, or one of those window toys you give to really awful children.” Vulx shuddered. “He’s a blessed menace, our Duke Ligur, but he’s always been like that. But Hastur says, he’s not just a menace, he’s not _him_. There’s even a human name for it — ”

“Capgras delusion,” said Aziraphale quietly.

“That’s the one. Bloody awful thing, and Hell didn’t even come up with it.”

“You know, I’ve rebound a lot of books in my time,” mused Aziraphale. These were metaphysically choppy waters, and caution was advisable. “Stories fall apart, and I learned how to stitch them back together the human way. You get to recognise other restorers’ techniques; the sticklers for tradition, and the ones who add little improvements. The work in question is quite the epic, but I think I recognise the style of rebinding. Vivid, imaginative, and all that.”

“The work in question…but the work in question is what happened. It’s history. Who can rebind _history_?”

 _That_ _’s close enough,_ thought Aziraphale, and there was a tiny, polite shift in what had been said. He was still a Principality, even if he didn’t stand on ceremony about it.

“Ah. No-one directly relevant to Hastur’s complaint. Which, as you have probably gathered, is not without foundation.”

“Christ on a bike, I can’t tell you what I’ve been through to hear that.” Vulx’s raw-boned frame sagged in his chair. “People start whispering that the Duke’s lost the infernal plot. He blows up at them and says he’s not standing for this, that he’s a front-line volunteer, and that where he came from, he was a King — ”

“Not modest of him to say so, but true.”

“Really? I did wonder. Anyway, he gets knocked back another rank, doesn’t he. Says he still doesn’t regret it. He _defies_ them, angel. Spits brimstone and maggots. And that’s when they chain him.”

“Chain him?” Aziraphale was brought up short. “But…Hell’s fetters won’t hold an Abomination, not properly. Though he can definitely get banished…”

He trailed off. The idea was grim in the extreme. Heaven had been too polite to dwell on what banishment entailed — but otherwise, what surety could an Abomination give? Long ago, H’zr aph’aal had given his. He had to assume that Hastur had done likewise with Hell. And now, apparently, Hastur’s oath had been called in.

“Did I say they’d used fetters? They _chained_ him. They got someone on the technical side to link up all the Yellow Signs he’s ever left on earth, so one lead straight into the next, and when he stormed off into the one that’s in Hell, they erased it and they got the two ends and they joined them up like a bike chain. There’s nowhere for him to come out. He’s stuck in The Place.”

Aziraphale paled. Hastur was formidable. The idea of him commanding legions in Hell had always struck Aziraphale as absurd — Hastur had never _needed_ legions, and having thousands of demons tag after him must have cramped his unpleasant style. Nevertheless. To be trapped in The Place. The angel shivered.

“Yeah,” said Vulx, studying him closely, “so now he’s got no-one on his side but me and Malacoda, and we’re not exactly flavour of the century Downstairs. I ask Mal to do a portent sweep for anyone, anyone at all, in Hell or Heaven or anywhere else, who could confirm that what the Duke said was true, so that if we do manage to get him back, he won’t be punished all over again. She says it’s too risky. I say I’ll do it, I’ll ask them, I don’t give a pygmy shrewfuck who they are. We both swear on our Falls to go through with it. So, we got hits for your big shots — First or Second Heaven, and hits for ours — Eighth or Ninth Circle, like I’m gonna even think about going _there_. And one hit for someone Earthside. Europe. England. London. Soho. Bingo.”

This was all very unfair, thought Aziraphale. It was one thing to wish that some terrible fate should befall Hastur. It was quite another for a demon to waltz up and say: there you have it, the worst thing you could wish for is done already, and your hands are perfectly clean.

“What do you expect me to do?” he said at last.

Vulx shrugged, then grinned the sort of grin that only the damned can pull. “Conscience is an exploitable flaw. Also, not a single Abomination in Hell is willing to be straight with us, so we’re left with you, and your frankly gross morality kink which I never thought we’d be desperate enough to rely on.”

“And yet, here we are,” pointed out Aziraphale tartly.

Another yelping, defiant laugh. “Not only the weirdest angel, but also the bitchiest. You’re wasted on Heaven. D’you know what it was that sent the Yellow Duke over the edge? Something Beelzebub said to him about Ligur being…different. I don’t even think they meant it badly, though it’s always hard to tell with them. It was bloody weird, in fact, because all they said was —”

“Could it possibly have been along the lines of, _‘It’s not the end of the world’_?”

The demon stared at him, suddenly afraid again, and nodded. Nothing human should be able to raise its hackles like that.

\----------

Aziraphale was caught on two sets of hooks: his long, improbable loyalty to Crowley, and his own quixotic notion of Somehow Doing Right. This was the sort of quandary that only humans should be faced with. It was why God had once claimed Vengeance for Her own, with the firmness of an adult pointing out that the big, sharp scissors were not playthings. It was the reason that Aziraphale had reared up shapelessly on the landing of Crowley’s flat a year ago, clutching a cheese-plant soaked in holy water, staring at a pair of cowering demons who had mercifully been nameless to him back then, aghast at what he was about to do. That had not done it was down to God, he supposed, and Her fierce unpredictable mercies.

On the one hand, Aziraphale did not know everything that had happened after what he had come to call the Tadfield Event, nor did he want to. Signing on with either Heaven or Hell rendered one voluntarily susceptible to Greater Miracles, and also, a certain — ahem — _gifted_ young person deserved the freedom to make more than one choice about his future, without Eldritch beings peering over his metaphysical shoulder.

On the other, Aziraphale suspected a great deal, because he was an Abomination, and whilst you might pull the wool over some of his eyes, it was beyond even the most catastrophically gifted to cover all of them at once.

Aziraphale felt like such a traitor. He had failed to save Crowley, and now he was going to break faith even with his memory. The demon had been desperate, not just for his own sake but for the world’s, but it was true: he hadn’t given Ligur a chance.

And if Hastur believed that Ligur was not the same Ligur, he wasn’t wrong. Aziraphale’s bookshop had been restored considerably beyond his wildest imaginings, whilst Crowley’s Bentley had acquired a set of Ninja Turtle window stickers that turned out to be impervious to white spirit, acetone, and exasperated demonic miracles. A fair number of humans who’d expired in the run-up to the world’s biggest near-miss must now be getting on with their lives, and for the first time, Aziraphale found himself wondering whether any of _them_ got bonus features out of the deal. And then there was Ligur. Aziraphale could only hope that a Certain Person — oh, what was the point, Adam knew all about him, he could surely use his name — had not tried to give the demon Duke anything like empathy, or a sense of humour. But from what he’d heard of Hastur’s reaction, he feared the best.

 _Advise me, Crowley_ , he pleaded. _What do I do now? Do I help them? I_ _’m not even sure how._

But his memory of Crowley kept its counsel. Bastard.

Aziraphale came to a decision. He went to his Desk, where the leather was worn shiny in the sort of way that resembled the tell-tale smears left on a touchscreen by the unlocking pattern. He ran his right hand over it, in a familiar and complicated and slightly nervous gesture. There was a _sound_ , like the first three bars of Toccata and Fugue arranged for something with a digestive system, his signet ring glowed, and all at once, two solid, physical things rested beneath his hand, though he had only asked the Desk for one. The first was, naturally enough, a book. The other was a portable silver inkwell, which Aziraphale palmed with a conjurer’s deftness that would have done John Maskelyne proud. The book, he kept in his hand; it was a slim paperback with a coverful of lurid rockets.

“Sapient pearwood has a lovely grain, but it can get crotchety. In case you ever do find your way back in here — just in case, mind you — please don’t pester my Desk. Someone once tried to burgle this place, and I only know because it spat out their shoes some time in the Thirties.”

Vulx stared at him. “Yeah. Right. You’d be the person to own something like this. Maybe you even deserve each other. Don’t worry, I’d rather stick my arm in a font.”

Aziraphale didn’t keep much in the very secret drawer of his desk (all right, in the Very Secret Drawer of his Desk). The manuscript of his perpetually-unfinished novel, which was so astoundingly bad that Hell would have probably have offered him an advance on it. A portable silver inkwell containing the ink he used for his Sigil — the restless hue of the Cerenerian Sea that he would never set eyes on again. And half-a-dozen childrens’ books. These were not rare books. They were not even unica: books so rare that there was only one known surviving copy. They were rare because their authors had absolutely, definitely written them, but would be very surprised if anyone had told them so. They were existential contraband. They were the sort of prank that would be a hoot to play on a bookseller, if you were an Infernal thaumaturge who wanted to offer a ‘thank-you’ present, and you were eleven years old.

Aziraphale had chosen ‘Biggles Goes To Mars’, which was a bit of a corker. He thought for another moment, and slipped the little silver inkwell into his pocket; if his Desk had presented it to him, unprompted, the thing must have its reasons. Then he braced himself, and handed his irreplaceable paperback to the demon Vulx.

“Signed by W. E. Johns himself,” said Aziraphale, almost tripping over his words to get the thing over with, “and I am sure, that if you weighed all the carbon atoms or whatever thing it is that humans do, it would have been published in 1955, just as it says. I’d like to tell you what it’s worth — but I can’t, because it’s not on any catalogue in existence. And yet it’s perfectly genuine. Not a first edition, you understand. The _only_ edition.”

Vulx sniffed, but not dismissively. He scented along the spine of the paperback like a truffle dog, weighed the book in one palm, riffled its pages in front of his face in one rapid, start-to-finish scan, then performed a mental calculation that made his eyes momentarily roll up in his head. Afterwards he nodded, in awful wonderment.

“A few continuity errors in reality,” he said. “Our word against theirs. But this one’s _real_. A physical artifact. An adventure story for kids. Who’s even capable of making something like this, then forgets to patch the provenance? All that power, and no field experience...”

“I shan’t need it back,” Aziraphale broke in hastily. “It’s yours, if you need it. If you can find someone it will convince. I think you’d better choose that person carefully.”

The demon thought it over. “Dagon might do it. For the Files’ sake. They’re a right bastard, but they don’t care about much besides factual accuracy. And they’re one of your sort. More or less.”

Aziraphale thought back a frankly illegal number of years, back when Dagon had been nothing but chilly iridescence and the crushing weight of memory, an abyssal Abomination almost as alien to Aziraphale as either of them were to Heaven or Hell. But they’d always been a stickler for precision, even then.

“Dagon had a different name when I knew them, and we really never got on. Probably best not to mention me.”

Vulx nodded. Gripped the book as if it were a live grenade.

“Okay, angel. Name your price. Malacoda said it’d be steep.”

“Gosh. That’s rather noble of you.” Vulx scowled at this, and Aziraphale angel looked apologetic. “I would like the power to decide Hastur’s fate — but if I get it, I can’t tell you how I’ll decide. I don’t yet know myself, you see.”

A slow nod. “Typical. Yeah, you could fuck us over nicely with that. After all the risks we’ve taken. After all the work Malacoda’s put in. If we clear Duke’s name, it still won’t matter, because none of us can get him out of where he’s gone now. Bloody angels. Trust in me, and lah-de-bloody-dah.”

“Well, you _will_ have to trust in me, I’m afraid.”

Aziraphale didn't raise his voice, but _something_ peered out from behind his eyes, something that kept itself to itself in a dene hole in Clopton Stoke, diffident and kindly and far more dangerous than it wanted to be. Vulx had once met that aspect of Aziraphale before. He took a step backwards.

“All right, all right. No need to get shirty. I — we — accept your terms. Not that we’ve got much choice.” The demon cautiously handed him a glossy piece of paper emblazoned _Regiallo’s Pizzas — Hasty but Tasty!_

Aziraphale inspected it. The fact that it was a pizza menu flyer did not surprise him unduly, nor did the fact that it had an offering called The Eastern Gate, featuring seafood, flaming hot chillies, and fresh grapes. He had seen a great many stranger things than this; indeed, he was one himself.

Though neither would be glad to admit to it, Heaven and Hell both used Servitors, beings as much like an ordinary angel (or demon) as a plankton cell was like a whale. On earth, Hell’s Servitors generally took the form of advertising, free samples, post-it notes, and graffiti, whereas Heaven’s manifested as erratum slips, business cards, and brown paper packages tied up with strings. Aziraphale ran a fingertip over the Pizzeria Regiallo’s Yellow Sign, and several sets of sliced-olive eyes woke up to blink at him in curiosity, and then in disappointment. He was not what it was looking for. A Servitor was the simplest conscious being in the Universe. Each was capable of wanting one particular thing, and this one wanted to be found by the Abomination called Hastur.

Aziraphale frowned. “But this is…”

The demon put a finger to his lips. “Harmless advertising matter. Last of Malacoda’s specials. Downstairs confiscated all the rest, and recycled the lot of them. I won’t pretend this one’s over-bright, though; it only escaped because it got stuck down the back of a radiator.”

“Very well. I want one more thing. I want to know what the coincidence field told you, when you were looking at your phone.”

“Like I said, angel, it almost never has any bearing on the situation. Bit of a bummer, really.”

“Nevertheless, as a long-time collector of oblique prophecies, I should like to know. Even if it’s instructions for assembling a bookcase in Etruscan.”

Vulx grinned unhappily. “Fine, but I feel like I’m cheating you. It said ‘Somewhere in a field in Hampshire’. Does that mean anything to you?”

Aziraphale nodded, just once, and inspected the leaflet. He was wondering whether it would be unkind to fold it in quarters, when it shrank to the size of a business card that would just fit into his breast pocket. He took the hint. _Friend_ , he told it silently, and gave the pocket a gentle pat.

“I’ll see what I can do,” he said.

Vulx took his leave, wrestled his garish backpack through the door of the bookshop, and pedalled off down a side-street that would dump him back into the mortal Pandaemonium of London’s traffic, pre-emptively cursing the day he’d ever again agree to try facing down an Abomination. Even the nice ones were weirder than Dagon’s recipe for bouillabaisse.

———————————————————

Once he was truly alone, Aziraphale shut up shop in earnest. Locks and bolts and tedious reading matter in the window, plus enough Heavenly warding to make a Duke of Hell think twice. He didn’t intend to be disturbed or distracted. He would see this benighted business through himself.

“Am I still being tested?” he asked the empty air, in the deferential tone that angels used for one-sided conversations with Someone who hadn’t replied for six thousand years. In addition, it was awkward to recall that he had a track record of fibbing to an omniscient being, although he supposed that put God’s only known Eldritch recruit in the same boat with every human who’d ever lived. Perhaps this fact amused Her; perhaps not. He swallowed nervously, and went on.

“Doubtless, I _should_ be tested. I came very close to vengeance, after — after I got to Crowley’s flat, and he was gone, I could have killed the pair of them, Vulx and Malacoda, and then all this wouldn’t be happening. Whatever else is may be at work here, I know it was You who stayed my hand. But I just fear that I may fail this time, and if that turns out to be the case, I apologise in advance.”

Aziraphale rapped the spare keys of the Bentley on his own shop-counter, and they turned back into a novelty corkscrew in the shape of a leg. He had plans for the corkscrew, involving a certain half-bottle of 1959 Musigny, which was was exactly where he’d left it, in the backroom, waiting for a special occasion — and if this wasn’t a special occasion, if not a particularly happy or sensible one, he didn’t know what was. Besides, he wasn’t intending to drink very much of it.

The box file containing the remains of a couple of broken answering machines was still in the backroom. After a year of going among the human bereaved, it reminded Aziraphale uncomfortably of all the boxes and urns he’d seen on mantelpieces, inscribed with someone’s name, and a couple of dates. He ran his fingers over the top of it, his head turned aside. He blew dust off the framed photograph of Crowley, perched on the bonnet of his Bentley in a chalk-stripe suit, looking like trouble incarnate. He polished a couple of tumblers on his sleeve (no bloody miracles, not now, not for this), uncorked his wine, and filled them about a third-full with a hand that shook. He glared at his disobedient hand until it was steady.

For someone _human_ to be out to find the abomination Aziraphale, with enough determination to intuitively know and seek his Sign, suggested either a legitimate grievance, or an Eldritch compulsion. Aziraphale didn’t know which one would be worse. The idea that he, as an angel, might accidentally have done a human some awful wrong, or impressed his Eldritch nature irreversibly on their consciousness, was deeply troubling. ‘ _It shifts under observation, it feels weak and burdened, but it does not stop_ _’ —_ that had been the verdict of an angel vastly more powerful than himself. ‘ _When I snapped my fingers and suggested she piss off, she lobbed a flatscreen at me and swore in some weird language_ _’_ — that was the verdict of an ordinary demon. In the course of six thousand years, Aziraphale had seen a lot of human desperation, but he hadn’t encountered anything like this. He imagined a dusty figure, knee-deep in a skip, clutching a splintered piece of wardrobe to her chest and defying an agent of Hell.

“Why me, though?” he said aloud. “Why are you looking for _me_? How can we find each other? How can I possibly help?”

This time, he got an instant response from a familiar voice.

_Don’t quote me on this, but I’m pretty sure it’s because once upon a time, you volunteered for rescue duty. Six thousand years, Aziraphale, and you never told me how you first found your way to Heaven. Not that I’m surprised._

_Crowley! Where have you been? I needed advice._

_You did okay without it. Besides, I_ _’d never interrupt a spot of fraternising,_ added his memory of Crowley, with wry amusement. _Laying your angelic deference on poor, hard-working demons in bicycle shorts. We_ _’re simple creatures, really. ‘After you’ will get most of us, most of the time._

Aziraphale felt the colour rise to his face. _I did all that for a reason, you know._

 _I know. I_ _’m not much stupider than I always was. But what’s up with the wine? Were you going to pour one out for me, Aziraphale?_

_Of course not._

_Yeah, of course not. I believe you, though anyone else would think you were trying to hold a bloody seance in here. The side-effects of possessing a medium_ _…_

 _That_ _’s quite enough, Anthony._

… _but if you’re hoping wine will make me more insightful, you’ll be disappointed. And our friend in Lycra managed to talk you into helping Hastur out of a fate worse than anything_ you _could ever hope to inflict on him. My poor avenging angel, the only thing you should be served cold is sushi._

Aziraphale bit his lip. _Forgive me. I’m just no good at revenge. Defence, certainly. Combat, if the occasion calls for it; and in rare and unfortunate circumstances, Wrath. But not Revenge, it seems. Believe me, I do my best, but then I lose my nerve and — and in the end I have to_ help _people, do you understand? No matter what they’re like or who they are, if they’re getting the worst of it, I have to defend them. I don’t know what’s wrong with me._

 _H_ _’zr aph’aal,_ said the voice gently _,_ _you brilliant, Eldritch idiot: you_ _’re an angel. A natural angel. And Heaven was damned lucky to get you._

The memory of Crowley didn’t leave him then, but it fell silent. Perhaps it felt bad about mocking him. No, that was stupid. To the best of Aziraphale’s knowledge, Crowley had never, ever felt bad about mocking him, and the angel had been glad of it. You didn’t mock something that terrified the wits out of you.

All right, perhaps you did, but only if you were Anthony Crowley, who’d admitted that the Aziraphale’s true nature could be alarming, but did not seem to regard this as a downside of his company. Crowley, whose trust had somehow not broken even on the brink of Armageddon, when Aziraphale had loomed over him, brandishing a sword.

Crowley, who could be both terrified and fearless at the exact same time. Just a knack, he’d muttered, when the angel had pointed this out.

Aziraphale raised his glass, and clinked it against the absent demon’s.

“Cheers, old friend.” He looked the ancient photograph in the eyes, and drank.

And that was when he realised that the wine was tainted with blood.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ...aaand we're back to the scene we came in at in the very first chapter. It's been an aeon since the last update, for which I apologise. The next one should be a tad less belated.
> 
> Also, I don't know where the notion that Eldritch Aziraphale's desk would be second cousin to The Luggage came from, but I'm gonna roll with it. You don't refuse a random nudge from the Dungeon Dimensions.
> 
> (also, after imagining a lot of odd things for this fic, I still can't quite imagine Aziraphale's attempt at a Magic Realism novel...but I suspect it involves conversations about _budgeting._ )


	6. What if you never come down?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which The Angel Occasionally Known As H’zr aph’aal, But Only To His Friends is summoned to his dene-hole, and we once again discover why freshly-summoned Mythos beings can be tetchy.
> 
> Meanwhile, Clopton Stoke's festival kicks off with actual music (of a sort), regrettable T-shirts, and even more regrettable combinations of booze. It is tremendously uncool.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Many thanks to anyone who has read thus far. I sometimes glitch out about replying to people in a timely manner, like the coward I am, but I read and appreciate every comment.

**The back room of a bookshop in Soho, in which there is definitely not a modest shrine to a certain demon**

**June the 21st, 2010**

Aziraphale lowered his glass slowly, listening.

 _H_ _’zr aph’aal,_ said a voice, in the back of his capacious mind. It was a woman’s voice, and it sounded…aggrieved? And also, mortally afraid. That made sense.

What made a lot less sense was that it was a voice he somehow recognised, without being able to name — and for the moment, Aziraphale had no notion of how that could be. Even the tone of being rather put out was familiar.

 _Tharanak wgah'_ _— Ow! This smegging language! — Tharanak wgeh'n H_ _’zr aph’aal._

This was the sort of development he’d been fearing, ever since Vulx had warned him that whoever was after him was human, but he’d hoped to have at least a few days to get a better picture of the situation before anything serious happened. But it must already be under way, because he could taste blood on his lips, and it was someone else’s. _Human_ blood. A Summoner’s blood, driving some unclean ritual that he morally disowned, but which nonetheless had power. Thousands of years ago, Aziraphale had forsworn Chaos for Heaven, but not even the Almighty could break the connection to his original name.

He’d navigated his way out of the Outermost Void on a breadcrumb trail of holy feathers, on instinct, unaware that what he was doing could ever be called _good_. He’d signed up as an angel long before a few inquisitive humans had the misfortune to realise that the Eldritch existed, and came up with awful ways of getting its attention. And besides, the Entity Formerly Known as H’zr aph’aal was ex-directory, at least as far as humanity was concerned. His original name had been diligently scrubbed from every available copy the Liber Ivonis, the Mysteries of the Worm, the Seven Cryptical Books of Hsan, and von Junzt’s Unpronounceable Cults, one of the few books whose last surviving copy he would not lift a finger to save.

As far as humanity was concerned, A. Z. Fell was a frowsty bibliophile, and the most mysterious thing about him was that his shop seemed to prosper in spite of making a sale once in an indigo moon. If things got bad, if there was a crisis, if someone had enough arcane knowledge to formally request the aid of the Angel Aziraphale, only on Heaven’s C-list and happy in obscurity, then of course he would come, in Heaven’s name. Always. But he was not some abominable _thing_ , to be summoned with a slash across the palm, or something much worse.

He took another swallow of wine — but the taste of blood was back again, along with an insistent pull, and the distant sound of chanting.

 _Tharanak wgeh'n H_ _zr aph’aal_

 _K'yarnak f'shugg H_ ' _zr a̷p͜h’̨a̕al͞_

— _Ow again this isn_ _’t fair on the human voicebox watch the fricatives you stupid cow —_

It should not be. All right, he was an Abomination, but spiritually, he had moved on. He had not thought about a certain old chalk-mine near Clopton Stoke for an entire year; most of the time, he had permitted himself to forget that it was his true physical address. Also, the chanting was in the Old Speech — not the prettiest language, but surely the one with the greatest number of words for pseudopod. But this Old Speech was arranged in crude, forceful ways that were specific to _him, a_ Summons he could not refuse. No-one should be doing this thing to him, or to themselves, and certainly not when he had no wish to respond. Stop. Stop. Please, for the love of God. But the voice continued, without pity for either itself, or for him:

I͜͜ä̧͟! I̧̕ä̴!̢͘ ̵H̵̡’̷͡z͘͞͏r aph͏̧̡’̴͜a͟͡al͜!

F͝m̢'la̴t͘gh ̴p̧h'phle͡get̵h ̛ni’̸ļg̢h͞-͟z̵hr̢o͡ ͞'ai!

F͔͕̱̫m͏̙̲̤'͍̬̻͖l͎̜a̶̺̩͈̻̝̱t̬̼̰g̴̭h̳̖̬͕̳̥̥͘ n͚a̩̥̭̖͘ģ͓̪̗̰͖̜̝r̺̠̺a̘̙̘͍h̵͔̘̞͓͉'̧̞͈͎t͕̟̟͉̭͜ͅt͙m̹ ̡̘̫̠̱͔̬͚n̦̘̯̪̼i͎͎͈̭͢’҉̻l̖̯͎͙͖̕g̞̥̜̗͇̖̠ḥ̘̹͓̰̫͓͘-͚͚̖̫̼͖̕z͖̗̯̞̫̠h̯̣̳̗r̺̖͎o̰̤̟̯̼͓ ̵̘̯̹'̡͇̩͖̘̗a̝͠i͍̜̲̝̘̰ͅ!̫͉

Frustrated, Aziraphale did one of the things that he had sworn never to do. Instead of obeying the Summons, he warm-linked directly to the consciousness of the person the blood belonged to. Much like making a racing change in a Bentley, a trick Crowley had loved to show off, this manoeuvre needed both dexterity and practice. A single slip, and you’d fry the average Summoner’s brains like a drop scone.

“Is there anybody there?” he inquired, in the mental equivalent of a whisper, trying his best to sound serene.

There were a couple of seconds of silence, and then words. Words set to a tune, of sorts. A musical jangle broke into his consciousness, and then a man’s voice was wailing breathily, from a great way off —

“ _Oh yeah_

_I want to see you_

_Want to see you standing in your underwear_ _…”_

A pretty forward request, not to mention unlikely.

“I _think_ we might have a crossed line,” said Aziraphale.

The voice cut off, and was replaced by the original, female one — still terrified, but tinctured faintly with hope.

“Oh. _Oh._ You don’t sound completely horrible. How odd.”

“Did you not call for H’zr aph’aal?” The angel’s original name had never sounded less reassuring to him. _Abholy_ , his mind supplied unhelpfully. “Or possibly Aziraphale, Servant of the Lord?”

“Oh, bugger,” replied the voice. “Broke my own rule for a sec. I always say, never hope _anyone_ you call will be nice. Yes, I did call, but only because I had to, and if you’re going to devour me, get on with it. I can’t stand here staring into a pit all day, and I had to put my fingers in my ears to hear you above the sodding concert.”

Even by Mythos standards, this was an odd development. Aziraphale took another sip of wine; now the active phase of the Summoning had stopped, it tasted like what is was, a good old Burgundy.

“A concert? Unless I’m mistaken, you must be in a field outside Clopton Stoke.”

“I am. And there’s a tribute festival on, a field or so over, and I’m going to die to the music of some band called Paste. Typical, really.”

“ _Paste?_ ” Aziraphale considered the possibility that his own sanity was making a break for it.

There was a sigh, of the sort that an expert in sighing can use instead of an eye-roll. “Look, I got your stupid Call and it forced me to come out here and Summon you, whatever you really are, in that awful language I never asked to know. God knows no-one else who speaks it ever wants to buy anything. I’ve had a pretty weird life, and I never asked for that either — but let me tell you, this last year has been off the clock. Now I’ve done the Summons, it’d be nice to not be kept waiting. I can’t get any more drunk, and I’m scared.”

That did it. Whatever else he might be, Aziraphale was an angel of mercy. Authentic mercy, not just killing people suddenly when they weren’t expecting it — but given the circumstances, he couldn’t think of a way of explaining this that would sound convincing. At any rate, not at a distance.

“I’m coming over. Close your eyes.”

“ _Coming over?_ Aren’t you here already?”

“In one way, I am — and in another way, I’m not. Now, _please_ close your eyes. I’m not about to devour anybody.”

“I bet all devourers say that. Just before they swallow your tongue, and siphon out your spleen, and —”

Aziraphale adopted as much of a command tone as he dared. “Kindly. Close. Your. Eyes.”

Then he cut the connection, took a deep breath, and _went_. Time was bridged behind him: the Eldritch angel vanished as abruptly as if he’d been somewhere else the whole time, and reality had only just cottoned on...

—̧̫̼͘͠—̫͝—҉̸̹̠—͎͕̥͎̰͟ͅ—̣̣͇̝̞̱̻͎—͈͉͉̪͔̤̳—҉̼͇̩͙̬͉—̸̨͉̤͇̲̪̹̺̰—͏̠̣̥͍—͏̵͕ͅ—̵̧̖̖͇͖̼͇̟͘—̬̗̼̣͎—̶̬̦ͅͅ—̵͇͓͔̱̯̞͙͇̞—̷̡̡̭̺͓̼ͅ—̸̨̛͙̮͕̩̟̟̩—̲̥̝͙̞̣͖͓—̵̡͚̯̱͖̝̭̦̩—҉̲̪̻ͅ

~~**No time like the present, and nowhere like home** ~~

_Not in the spaces we know, but between them, they walk serene and primal, undimensioned and to us unseen._

H’zr aph’aal is currently perambulating the shadows of creation, trying to mind his own business. He does not feel serene (nor, indeed, very primal — a word he associates with aftershaves that Crowley inflicted on the 1980’s). This is because there are regions of the The Place where time does not play by the rules, H’zr aph’aal is currently inside one of them…and it seems to be trying to communicate with him.

The _communiqu_ _é_ takes the form of a prophetic Vision, a Vision featuring a demon, and that demon is not Crowley. The Vision wallops H’zr aph’aal in the core of his being, with a force that would discorporate him were he in his human semblance. Which he is very, very much not. The pizza menu and the inkwell — both of them innately Eldritch, and capable of surviving this ordeal — are torn from him. Both are as surprised as he is: the menu flutters like a shot macaw, and the inkwell spills its precious contents into the abyss, where, from force of habit, the seasilver ink freezes into the shape of an alto clef.

The only thing H’zr aph’aal has managed to keep within himself is his signet ring, custom-forged by Heaven’s armourers from his very being, its wings not merely a sign of allegiance, but the blueprint for his Heaven-issued corporation. The ring has had one careful owner in six thousand years, and anyone who wants it will have to fight him.

The attack doesn’t come; instead, there's a Vision. H’zr aph’aal is unable to tell how far in the future the Vision might be, nor does he want to know. Hopefully, a very long way off indeed.

Aziraphale the bibliophile Angel, collector of Prophetic Works, viewed Earth’s prophets — whether drunk, mad, lonely, or ostracised — with condescending sympathy. H’zr aph’aal the Abomination would like to apologise to all of them: having a prophetic vision is _awful,_ especially when it ’s inflicted by Something that seems to think this is the least dangerous way of communicating they share. H’zr aph’aal can’t properly behold the Something, since it’s as far beyond his own comprehension as his True Form is beyond a human’s. He just knows it’s _there_ , dire and intricate, and since it hasn’t devoured the possibility of his own existence, it’s trying to be…not friendly, perhaps, but neutral.

In his Vision, he and H'aaztre _are_ fighting, but they are not fighting each other. They are fighting off their own kind, in the way that humans would call back-to-back, except that their natural dimensions lack a cognate term for this. They are fighting desperately, without weapons and needing none, in the way that humans would also call no-holds-barred. They are fighting to protect a pass, a bridge, a connection to the reality they have both sworn — though for very different reasons — to defend.

H’zr aph’aal cannot tell if they’re winning or losing, but he is not past caring: they _must_ win. They must and will win, perhaps not forever, but both he and H'aaztre come from places without any concept of Eternal Victory. There’s always someone who is strong in the ways that you are weak, and there’s always someone else for whom you are their very worst nightmare.

H'aaztre braces him up. There will always have to be a fight, H’zr aph’aal realises suddenly. If it doesn’t happen this time then it will happen one day, since both he and H'aaztre have sworn to defend Earth’s universe from their native Chaos until they can no longer do so. They are existential turncoats, and as Hastur once rudely told him, as they fought amidst a scholar’s ruined dreams of omniscience, there’s no going back from that. They will never desert the cause of God’s weird little planet, because they can’t. Not for love. Not for hate. Not for anything.

He should think of some suitably motivating words. Angelic. Otherworldly. Simple, and at the same time, profound.

What he actually thinks is: _At least it'_ _s not the bloody Sound of Music_.

It’s not his own thought, of course. It’s Crowley’s. His memory of Crowley is here with him, in the Outermost Void, where no true demon or angel can ever go. A Crowley so vivid that only love and grief could create it. Crowley, the ingenious bastard, cobbled together from sarcasm and memories, loyal beyond trivial considerations whether or not he actually exists.

At his back, H’zr aph’aal feels H'aaztre laughing too — a laugh that would flay a human consciousness and hang it out to dry. Although he cannot hear the particular conversation that elicited the laugh, since it’s happening somewhere within H'aaztre, H’zr aph’aal knows exactly whose voice the Demonic Abomination must be listening to now. Swinging through Hell, indeed. Well, _really_.

Is this Vision a warning? A threat? An offer of help? H’zr aph’aal cannot tell — does not have time to tell, for the Vision gives him a nudge that aligns him with the Summoning in Clopton Stoke, where there is not only a Sigil of his own, deep in the dene-hole, but also a live human being spitting his name through bleeding lips. No-one has made such a sacrifice to him for thousands of years, and hopefully no-one will again. H’zr aph’aal despises the shedding of blood in his name, and all that it implies about his nature. But it still works. Time is bridged in front of him, and he is dragged home, in no recognisable shape.

—̨͟—̡̛͘—҉̢̛—҉̧͟͟—̛͜͡—͟

After H’zr aph’aal’s departure, nothing is left but a startled-looking pizza menu flyer bearing the Yellow Sign, in a complicated orbit around a frozen ink spill. The ink — H’zr aph’aal’s own formula, made to a recipe that would drive an Earthly calligrapher insane — is the silver of the Cerenerian Sea, and from certain angles, the spill looks like an alto clef.

Abandoned in the Outmost Void, in the company of a new-formed Sigil of H’zr aph’aal, the menu flyer for Regiallo’s Pizzas — Hasty but Tasty! — is happy. It is too simple a being to be afraid of anything but failing its mission, drilled into it by the demon Malacoda: to either find Duke Hastur, or to wait to be found by Duke Hastur. But even binary choices are challenging for a servitor like itself. H’zr aph’aal the Wise has removed the first possibility, and now all that is left is the wait.

“Weird how things work out,” it observes, to the supercooled ink that comprises the Sigil of H’zr aph’aal.

“Weird in comparison to what, precisely?” retorts the ink, which has clearly been educated beyond its station in life.

After what might be a few minutes, or several million years, something turns up.

If it were a scent, it would be putrescine.

If it were music, it would be for a choir of severed tongues.

If it were fabric, it would be a pall of rotting damask, torn from the catafalque of a king.

Of course, it is none of these things. Faced with entities that exist in too many dimensions for sanity, the human mind tends to blank them and fill the space with core sensory input — strange colours and smells, music in impossible keys — and the best concept the human mind can fit to H'aaztre is yellow. It is the colour of jaundice, pus, and contagion, of ostracism and penalties, but it is also, like crimson and purple, a royal colour; just because you are an Eldritch Abomination does not mean you cannot also be a snob. And here is H'aaztre himself, racing through the Outermost Void, making himself as small as inhumanly possible.

In humanoid form, Hastur is more at ease in a well-composted trenchcoat than the blazers he wore to play Basil Kitrinos. As H'aaztre, he can be regally repulsive, millions of vermiform beings in close formation. At present, he is neither. A genuine demon or angel, if forced to flee for its life, will compress itself into a singularity, and although beings of the Mythos work differently, Hell’s hackers came up with a work-around: you use a _lot_ of singularities, and stack them on top of each other. So unlike old-fashioned, rambling H’zr aph’aal, H'aaztre can go small as well as swift if needs must. It does pinch considerably.

H'aaztre is looking for something. For _somewhere_. As certain mad scribe tried to tell us, H'aaztre knows where the Old Ones broke through of old, and where They shall break through again. It is where H'aaztre broke through himself, and because of this, he has fled past this un-place an impossible number of times. ‘Redeeming feature’ is not a concept applicable to demons, but H'aaztre’s damning virtue is loyalty; he is loyal to Hell. He would rather be in Hell than in anything approaching the human concept of Paradise, and he will never stop trying to get back there. Never.

And after innumerable passes, he finds something. Two things, to be precise: a prissy silver Sigil whose presence there is only one way to account for, and a pizza menu flyer doing its best impression of a spaniel whose master has just returned from the Western Front.

H'aaztre feels the pull of the Yellow Sign on the flyer, and screeches to a halt to inspect it. For a moment, he wonders if it’s some cosmically awful joke.

 _You_ _’re not far wrong,_ says a familiar growl in his memory, _but I think it_ _’s on both of us —_

_Ligur?_

— _and with luck, it_ _’ll have a proper punchline. Ready?_

And all of a sudden, as H'aaztre’s true form blooms in astonishment like a rotting comet, Hell’s hooks snag his coattails, and drag him home.

He is howling with laughter. He knows the landing will hurt beyond description, and so it does — but H'aaztre is a being of special tastes, most of them awful. It’s like diving from the stratosphere into a nice warm bath, if your idea of a nice warm bath is a cubic mile of boiling sulphur, in which damned souls rise and fall like baking-powder submarines. H'aaztre spits out nuggets of brimstone, and wonders if Dagon, Mormo, and the rest of his Abominable colleagues in Hell will be at all glad to see him.

On balance, probably not.

—̷̢̈̆̈́ͭ͜—̵̢͆̽͊͋̌̚—ͣ̒ͮͨ—̴̏̑̍ͮͥ̓͑—̧ͪ̈̾ͭ͘—̿ͬ͗҉—̀̽͂͡—̴ͫ̈̅ͭͩ͝—̨̛͛̂͛ͧ̓̇̿̇̎͝—́̓ͫ̅͐̓̇—̧̛ͫ͋ͯ—̂̿ͦͬ̚͘—ͧ̀̔̽̃̈́̐̅̚҉̶͞—ͦͭ̋͒ͦ̂͘̕—͋̓҉—̷̀̈ͥ͟—̍ͤ͟—̴ͨ̒̿͢—͑ͩ̃̄ͧ̑̈

**Clopton Stoke, Hampshire**

**June the 21st, 2010**

..the Angel Aziraphale had often lamented that due to their iron content, old inks tended to corrode the vellum they were written on, until ancient wisdom became nothing but holes. This was an accident, due to the limited ingredients available to Medieval scribes.

Eldritch inks, inscribed upon the fabric of reality, did much the same thing to space-time, and that was by design.

As he departed the Outermost Void, H’zr aph’aal felt every Sigil he’d ever inscribed on Earth burrow towards him: the one in a subterranean chamber in Timbuktu. The one in a chapel in the catacomb outside Rome, the one in a cenote in Yucatan, and the one daubed in a ravine in New South Wales. The one in a fabled dead-end in the Bodleian stacks, the one behind a locked door in Brown University, Providence that was still inscribed ‘Prof. Angell’ (who’d been an odd chap, but no relation), and even the one in a cistern made by no human hands, now deep beneath a desert and silted up since the dawn of history. None of these would do, and especially, they would not do all at once. If he divided evenly between all the places on Earth, it would be messy, and there was no time to waste. Someone’s sanity was at stake, and it was all his fault, and...

And then Aziraphale was mercifully through, in what passed for one piece.

He knew he was through, because the fabric of the reality he loved so much, and which he had sworn to protect, came pre-installed by God with mod cons like electromagnetism, subatomic forces, and gravity. Which meant he was currently about halfway down a very familiar a hole, somewhere in a field in Hampshire, illuminated by the glow from his Sigil, traced on the chalk below him.

The silvery light would have been a comfort, were it not for the fact that Aziraphale wasn’t falling towards it, but was suspended above it, the reason being that he’d part-merged with his Abominable side. The unabridged H’zr aph’aal, the part of him that ran to five floridly eldritch tons — rather than the pocket-edition Aziraphale who performed Angelic duties — might not be beautiful, but it was good at grabbing things. When it realised that the more mobile part of itself was going to drop in, it had surged out of the chalk tunnels in which it spent its time dreaming the magnificent, improbable dreams which were the day-to-day existence of the Angel Aziraphale, and caught him.

Since that moment in Eden when he’d twigged that mortal minds better not see his true form, Aziraphale had got _fast_ at generating his human semblance, using every trick at his disposal, including a few gleaned from stage magicians. Even so, he’d ripped so fast through those Eldritch portals that the blueprint of his human likeness hadn’t caught up with him. The angel felt within himself for his signet ring, and thanked God it was still there. The problem was, he currently had no fingers on which to wear it.

His Abominable side was keen to help when it sensed trouble. It knew that an Angel should resemble a winged biped, under-equipped in the eye department and with a luminous head, and it tried its level best to provide. This meant that currently, Aziraphale had a jaw, but it opened at the top of his skull, to make room for a single eye with far too many pupils. He had _wings_ — not angel wings, but membranous things, webbed with Colours Out of Space, and guaranteed to blow your mind. In his panic, he was also making a weird droning noise, which probably didn’t improve matters one bit.

Something small and cylindrical dropped from above. A limb that Aziraphale hadn’t had half an hour ago caught it deftly, and raised it for his inspection.

It was a plastic camping mug. A trickle of fluid ran out of it and over Aziraphale’s Eldritch integument which, unlike human skin, was equipped with taste receptors. The flavour reminded him of the way Crowley’s old bootleg cassettes had sounded, the ones he’d recorded off pirate radio in the 70’s: cheap, potent, and somehow innately purple.

Aziraphale braced himself mentally, and looked up.

A woman was staring down at him, silhouetted against the June sky, swaying precariously on the brink of the dene-hole with her toes over the edge. She was neither especially young nor especially old, and she didn’t appear especially frightened. She wasn’t making any noise at all, and it took Aziraphale a second to realise that this was because she had either fainted outright, or the sight of him had fractured her psyche beyond repair. He winced when he saw that at her upper lip had been split by the invocation. That explained the blood.

Some way in the distance, Paste were getting stuck in to a spirited rendition of Sorted for E’s and Wizz.

The woman finally lost her footing and went over the edge, but a nexus of concerned pseudopods caught her before she’d fallen more than a few feet. Aziraphale lowered her to the floor of the dene-hole, and settled her in the recovery position. She was wearing jeans, a canvas bum-bag, an Altoids-tin locket adorned with a plastic gems and a cameo of a skeleton, and a T-shirt emblazoned with the word ‘Stoked!’. Pinned to the T-shirt was a laminated badge that read: ‘Hi, I’m Lisa. Ask me about our lovely Sponsors’.

She seemed to be unconscious rather than deceased, but the angel doubted it would matter much. She’d seen the sort of thing he could become. She’d _seen_ him.

 _Congratulations, H_ _’zr aph’aal,_ he thought bitterly, _after six thousand years of being ever so careful, you'_ _ve buggered up and done it. You’ve driven an innocent human mad. Even I wouldn’t want to be stuck down here with me if I wasn’t used to it._

With a sinking feeling, Aziraphale assumed a less alarming shape. A human hand appeared, signet ring first of all, its fingers gripping the camping mug and its wrist disappearing into a mass of odd anatomy that slowly retreated up his arm, leaving pink skin behind it, dusted with hair. The halfway stage was always the worst, somehow; the bit when you somehow had to re-pack yourself behind a human face and grow lips and a tongue, but he managed it. In the interests of decency, he set his scruples about miraculous garments aside, using Crowley’s old trick for on-the-fly camouflage: generate the average of whatever the humans in the vicinity are wearing.

Which put Aziraphale in harem pants, a pair of sandals, a T-shirt emblazoned ‘AD/BC’, and the distinct feeling that his hair wasn’t its usual fleecy white.

“ _At least_ you’re _spared the sight of me, Crowley,_ _”_ he said…and then realised he’d spoken out loud.

“Ynrcrwly wtfk,” said a dazed voice behind him. “Wchtyrctlbleedhnl.”

With a dimmer-switch gesture, Aziraphale tweaked the lighting so the dene-hole was bathed in a friendly glow. The woman had levered herself to a sitting position, and was looking about with unfocused eyes. He healed her injured lip with a thought: it wasn’t much, but at least it would _work_. To see even the most minor miracle succeed might give him hope, while he attempted to find out if any of her sanity could be salvaged. He also took the liberty of sobering her up a considerably.

“Try getting up, Lisa,” he suggested, without much hope of being understood. But seemingly, he was. “Oops, now! Gently does it.”

The woman backed away from him, which was understandable, then squinted up at the edge of the dene-hole high above, where clumps of cow-parsley swayed below the branches of an oak, beyond which the sky was flawlessly blue. She raised one hand to her face — a wry, expressive face with a well-travelled tan.

“But…I split my lip. Pretty badly, too. Saying this stuff is like giving a can-opener a blowjob.”

There was no way that Aziraphale’s own consciousness would have come up with a metaphor like _that_. She was not insane, and he hadn’t overwritten her free will with his own, but it had been a narrow squeak. He sagged with relief, and offered anyone who might be listening Upstairs a quick prayer of gratitude.

“Hang on, why am I still talking? Who the Hell are you _?_ No offence, but if anyone’s going to get eaten first it’s going to be me.” The woman gave him a suspicious once-over, and came to an unwelcome conclusion. “Oh, poot. It’s still _you_ , isn’t it? I’m stuck in a smegging pit with something that calls itself bloody _H_ _’zr aph’aal_. _”_

She got the apostrophes right.

No-one _ever_ got the apostrophes right.

“My dear young lady—” began Aziraphale, only to receive the sort of glare that had made the demon Vulx think twice. “I realise, in the circumstances, this may be hard to credit, but I _am_ an Angel of the Lord. Not in the devouring business at all. But if you feel your sanity is slipping, let me know, and I’ll do a bit of miraculous shoring-up.”

All these reassurances failed to set the dear young lady’s mind at ease. “An angel. For starters, they’re supposed to be nice, so they don’t exist, but you in particular have got some nerve to call yourself an _angel_. An angel called H’zr aph’aal?”

“Heaven reworked the name,” explained the man-shaped being in a daft T-shirt, “and not all angels _are_ nice, in the modern sense, but a few of us try. I am the Principality Aziraphale, Spawn of Abhoth, Angel of the Eastern Gate, He Who Reads All, and Connoisseur of Advanced Sushi. Forgive me for having the advantage in names, but you did come labelled, so I know that you are Lisa…”

“…Morrow. And you’re not an angel, you’re a humanoid abomination.” Lisa Morrow gave him the look of the someone who’s invested time and money getting drunk enough to think about such matters, and resents being forced to give up their advantage. “I’ve read about those things, worst of the bloody lot.”

In spite of his good manners, Aziraphale bridled, his form of address slipping a couple of centuries. “My good woman! I am Abominable by nature, and humanoid by necessity, but an angel by profession. Heaven once offered me a job — and God forgive me, but I took it.”

Lisa Morrow folded her arms. “Let’s get this straight: God runs a payroll, being an angel is a job, Heaven exists, and you’re their Abominable diversity hire. Fantastic. Now everything makes sense.”

The angel nodded eagerly. He hadn’t expected her to be so quick on the uptake. “Well, there weren’t many other candidates, and it’s only right to admit that I _was_ a tad pushy. I gave the the impression of having…transferable skills.”

Aziraphale never had been adept at sarcasm. He became aware that Lisa Morrow was staring at him with an expression of awe — the real, old-fashioned article, somewhere between ‘you’ve got to be kidding me’ and endless internal screaming.

“Transferable skills,” she echoed. “You’re not making this up, are you? Transferable Eldritch skills. And _did_ you have them?”

“Just a few,” admitted Aziraphale, “mostly in search and rescue, so let’s hope my talents haven’t deserted me. I believe that the first step with the walking wounded is to offer them a beverage.”

The archaeologists who surveyed the dene-hole in the 30’s, helpfully marking it as scientifically drab, but a hazard to ramblers, hadn’t left much behind: a lone boot, a pencil-stub, an old briar pipe, and a bashed enamel mug. All had been scrupulously collected by Aziraphale’s more Eldritch 99%, which like the angel-shaped portion of him, _hated_ to throw anything away. And at last, the mug _was_ going to come in handy. Not because Aziraphale couldn ’t create a mug from scratch if necessary, but because hunting for one provided a welcome distraction for Lisa Morrow, while he pottered and poked, stirred up clouds of chalk-dust, silently told his Eldritch residuum to _be civilised for once, we have a guest_ _—_ and miracled up a table and a couple of folding bistro chairs while said guest’s back was turned. Experience (and a bit of conjuror’s panache) had taught him that if one miracled things up like this, most humans would just accept that they hadn’t noticed them earlier. But it didn’t seem to fool this particular human, who raised an eyebrow and sat without comment.

Aziraphale held up both mugs: his own, and the plastic one belonging to Lisa Morrow. “Forgive my ignorance, but…what _precisely_ was in here before?”

“Snakebite and black.” Aziraphale’s incomprehension must have showed on his face, for she explained the horror in full — “Half lager, half cider, and a shot of blackcurrant.”

“Tea,” decided the appalled angel. “We shall have lovely, civilised tea. Milk and sugar?”

“Hate the stuff in all its forms. Blech.”

Aziraphale made a non-committal noise, and a discreet miracle filled the mugs with tea anyway. Some way in the distance, the wailing and drum rolls continued, drifting down on cool, chalky air. Although the dene-hole wasn’t dark, Aziraphale took care that the two of them were sitting in a pool of real sunlight. He handed Lisa Morrow her mug, and tilted his head in enquiry.

“I’m no stranger to odd rituals,” he admitted, seating himself opposite her as if they were in a bistro in Fitzrovia, and not down a pit with a resident monstrosity that was also, in some ineffable way, himself. “But in my experience, they tend to take place after dark.”

“Well, this one happens in plain sight. It’s called ‘Stoked’. A festival for cover bands, and they all have names like Paste or The Antidote or the Barents Sea Monkeys — seriously, those are some of the better ones. Beyond glamorous, but still, it needs a Public Relations Manager —” Lisa Morrow tapped her laminated badge, “— and that’d be me. For my sins.”

The angel looked thoughtful. “Allow me a wild guess: you had no idea, when you took the job, that I would be your neighbour. It’s pure coincidence that you’re here at all.”

“Ha. You think I’d be here, if I’d known? Even I’m not _that_ dim. After that business with the skip and the wardrobe, when I found your Sigil was all smashed up, I was so, so glad. Thought the sodding curse had let me be. Then I did a bit more background reading, and apparently, hardcore curses give you a few weeks off before they really come for you. To get you to drop your guard, I suppose. But a job’s a job, and who thinks an Eldritch horror is going to camp out in sodding Hampshire.” She took a cautious pull from her mug. “Hey! I didn’t know tea could taste decent.”

“Finest Tippy Golden Flowery Orange Pekoe,” said Aziraphale confidentially, “also known as 'Far Too Good For Ordinary People'. Lucky that neither of us are.”

“Don’t say that like it’s a good thing. I _was_ ordinary. Worked in telesales, and it doesn’t get more ordinary than that. Best years of my life — which must give you some idea of what the rest of it’s been like.”

Aziraphale felt something he’d rarely experienced towards any human: not compassion, nor protectiveness, but an odd sense of fellowship. Moreover, the phrase ‘ _worked in a call centre_ _’_ dropped like a seed into his highly-cultivated mind, and immediately started sending out rootlets. Humans didn’t gain the ability to recite the Old Speech just like that. It needed either years of study, to the extreme detriment of their sanity and social life — or abrupt and traumatic close contact with a parlous survival rate. He put on his most reassuring smile.

“Being out-of-the-ordinary can be considerably better than that, I promise. And in spite of my unconventional form, I don’t — I simply do not _curse_ people. Not in thousands of years. My job description is quite the opposite, and if any significant mischief has been done to you, I shall endeavour to make amends.”

Lisa Morrow sighed. “Significant mischief? Yes, I suppose that’s one way of putting it. I’d hate to see what you call a disaster.” She came to a decision. “All right, then. You asked for it, so you’re going to hear it — on one condition. You’re going to tell me who the Hell this bastard Crowley is.”

“What?” said the Eldritch angel, still radiating his _‘be not afraid’_ demeanour. He folded his hands on the table, keeping the wings of his signet ring visible.

“You know, whatever you were talking to, when you thought I was out of it? _That_ particular Crowley? Anthony Cowwley, that was the name on the list. Zero-two-zero, seven-four-double-nine, and some fancy Mayfair number — except whatever answered the phone wasn’t him.”

Aziraphale swallowed. “You — _you_ telephoned Crowley? _When?_ ”

“Years ago.” She narrowed her eyes. “So. You _do_ know someone called Crowley. And you like him. He seems to piss most people off.”

 _Don_ _’t hope,_ Aziraphale told himself. _You are duty; your are discipline. You are an Angel of the Almighty. You do not need hope._ He strove to keep his voice level.

“Crowley did sometimes have that knack. You have my undivided attention.”

\----------

Shortly after the Great Postponement, Aziraphale had made a guilt trip to the United States, with Crowley as immoral support. The object of their quest was one Sgt. T. A. Deisenburger, lately stationed to Tadfield Airbase. In the heat of a taxing moment, the Eldritch angel had banished Sgt. Deisenburger _somewhere,_ but _somewhere_ covered a lot of ground, and Aziraphale had recalled uncomfortably that after scanning the man’s mind for a clue where to send him, he’d detected only the wish to not be a soldier at all. Follow-up work from Crowley showed that, in spite of the Antichrist’s talent for rebooting things, there was no Sgt. Thomas A. Deisenburger in the entire U.S. Air Force. Happily, Aziraphale’s fear that he might have deleted the sergeant from existence proved false, and he and Crowley had toasted the success of their expedition with a bottle of Deisenburger’s Original Farmhouse Cider.

But the angel had been left thoughtful. His impossible childrens’ books, the Ninja Turtle stickers embedded in the windows of Crowley’s Bentley — these were not merely gifts, in his estimation, but what modern parlance would term a _heads-up_. Not everything had gone back to exactly the way it was, some things because they didn’t want to, and others because they couldn’t.

Now he sat listening to Lisa Morrow — who, as it transpired, was one of those things that _couldn'_ _t_. It is a fact furtively scrawled in the Book of Eibon that if a Great Old One devours you in a fit of pique, there are going to be side-effects. Abrupt and traumatic close contact hardly began to cover her case.

“…and there were ten of us in the room when it happened,” she continued reluctantly, in the tone that (Aziraphale knew from long experience) meant the person had never mentioned this to anyone before. “We were all in stuck in the call centre, and I’d just called a Mr. Cowwley, to ask him if he’d like to buy some wall insulation. Except the person who answered wasn’t Mr. Cowwley at all. He said so himself.”

“Did he say who he really was?” prompted Aziraphale. He already had a fair suspicion. When he glimpsed Lisa Morrow’s aura, it was a more primary yellow than even a very creative human’s should be. But it was an innocent yellow, like a canary or a daffodil, and that was puzzling.

“Not at the time. Not in _words_.” Lisa Morrow shuddered at the memory. “But he knew my name, without me telling him. Said he was _unspeakably_ grateful to me, that I deserved a special gift for calling him. That he’d like to fulfill my ambitions, show me things beyond my wildest dreams. Deliver it all in person, in front of my friends. Creepiest thing ever — and that includes what I went through to summon _you_.”

“And, being a sensible soul, I suppose you hung up?”

“That’s what I thought, but I got the oddest feeling. Then I noticed what time it was. Everything seemed normal, except that instead of it being a bit after lunch, with rain bucketing down, it was getting on for five in the afternoon…and it was a _nice_ afternoon. Beautiful, even. We’d lost three solid hours, all of us, but only in that one room. When we worked out we’d all had the same feeling — I suppose we just decided to never, ever mention it. I should be glad things weren’t worse for the rest of them. That I’m the only one who has a clue about…about H'aaztre.”

 _Well, that explains your aura,_ thought the angel, and winced. Except that it should be a filthy yellow, and not as bright as if a schoolboy had given it a polish on his sleeve.

“In this Creation, he calls himself Hastur,” Aziraphale replied gravely, “as I call myself Aziraphale. And since you’re bound to have your suspicions, and have been clever enough to do some background reading, it’s only fair to admit to you that he’s something of my own sort. An Eldritch being. An — an Abomination.” He shuddered, and looked away.

“You do know how to sell yourself.”

“Honesty is the best policy, dear girl, even when it’s not the easiest. And since you recall Hastur’s name, I’m forced to conclude that you were less lucky than your co-workers?”

“Depends what you mean by luck. H'aaztre wasn’t lying: I did get a gift. And he did fulfill my ambitions, in his way. The gift was for languages, and the ambitions were for travel.”

“And the wildest dreams?”

“As soon as he said that, I knew I was in schtuck,” she answered quietly. “Because the wildest dreams are nightmares, aren’t they? Started with being eaten by a great tower of maggots, and went downhill from there.”

A tower of maggots was Hastur’s favourite way to manifest. Hastur, who at the best of times had never been very careful with his Eldritch side, making the Yellow Sign notorious among human dabblers in the arcane. And direct physical contact with the Mythos — especially contact as _thorough_ as the one Hastur had inflicted — was liable to leave an impression even an Antichrist-grade miracle couldn't totally erase.

“Sometimes they’re nightmares about space,” Lisa Morrow continued, “and sometimes about time. Sometimes they’re about things that aren’t pleased to have me drop in on them, not in my dreams, or in theirs.”

The angel was by now so deeply troubled that his Abominable side had half-shambled its way out of the side-workings of the chalk mine, glowing with the desire to heal the situation, to make it right _at once._ But Aziraphale was an angel and a bibliophile, and he knew no good came of stitching together a tale as tangled as this before your had all the pages laid out, and in their proper order. He shooed his Eldritch self away.

“And afterwards, you all knew the Old Speech?” he asked.

“Just me. Always was best with languages. Bollocks at maths, though. Bit on the dim side.”

“I doubt that’s true, and I’m usually right,” said Aziraphale, with less modesty than became him. “What happened to your colleagues?”

“Deborah went off to work on a goat co-operative in Gwent. Became a big cheese magnet. Magnate, I mean. Pete got PTSD and turned to the Church. Claire retrained and became a herpetologist. Breeds prize-winning geckos. Robert — ” she paused. “Rob manages festivals. Not posh ones, mind. He said we’d meet up here, share a drink or two. Seems he had second thoughts. More fool me.”

Aziraphale filed that detail away for further scrutiny. “And yourself? You’ve spent a good deal of time travelling, I can sense it.”

“Always wanted to be an international jet-setter. Did time as a travel rep in the Med, so I suppose it sort-of came true. Like I said, I _did_ get a gift for languages. Not all of them were around any more, but Greek was, more or less. Didn’t go smoothly to start with. Turns out a language can change a lot in a few thousand years.”

Aziraphale imagined Lisa Morrow the travel rep, in dress uniform — fuchsia nails, gladiator sandals, and skin a fashionable orange-tan — marching off a ferry somewhere in the Aegean, and addressing the bemused locals in the Greek of Euripides and Sappho.

“To see all the nations of the Earth is a worthy ambition.”

“To see all the nations of the Earth getting their ends away while wasted on Ouzo, not so much.”

Confronted with ribaldry, the Angel Aziraphale relied on old-fashioned looks. But the Abomination H’zr aph’aal had an earthier sense of humour, and a strange chuckle — almost a gurgle — echoed from the side-workings of the dene-hole.

Lisa Morrow peered suspiciously down a faintly-glowing tunnel. “We’re not alone here, are we? Come on, I _saw_ it. What’re you keeping in there?”

“Um. Myself? Well, most of myself, anyway. My Abominable ninety-nine percent, as it were.”

“Your Eldritch bit? Isn’t that cruel?”

“I beg your pardon?” Whatever reaction Aziraphale was expecting, it wasn’t _this_.

“Must be nippy down here in Winter, you should buy some wall insulation. And I’ve seen more exciting call centres. Doesn’t it get bored?”

Aziraphale racked his brains for an answer that wasn’t terrifying. At last a glowing figure the size and shape of himself, but less detailed, emerged from one of the tunnels, in a way the angel recalled from a whimsical claymation that Crowley had once tipped as destined for greatness. The thing gave Lisa Morrow one of Aziraphale’s little waves, combining the Abominable and the twee in a way that no-one but an Eldritch angel could achieve. Which was very fortunate.

“Eurk!” In spite of herself, she recoiled. “Um. Well, that’s a thing. Who’s doing _that?_ ”

“I am. It is. _It_ is still part of me. Or rather, I’m still part of it.” The other-Aziraphale made a bow, and rereated back into formlessness. “In various other dimensions than the ones you can sense, we’re still the same being. I do wish there were some less alarming way of putting things but I thought that a — a practical exposition might be simpler than a verbal one.”

The woman shrugged. “I’ve seen worse.”

Aziraphale could tell when someone was lying. And also, when they weren’t. “You know, Miss Morrow, most people have a rather adverse reaction to my…other forms. Even the very drunk ones. You have a great deal of mental fortitude.”

“I’ll put that down to years in telesales.”

“I suspect the true answer may be a touch more complicated. As far as I can tell, H'aaztre made an unsuccessful bid to turn you into his personal celebrant —”

Aziraphale, who recalled more of a certain Doomsday than was good for him, wondered if he should add _‘ — after the Apocalypse, in Hell, or maybe somewhere worse’,_ and decided against it. He pressed on.

“ — and some Abominations crave human worshippers. It rarely ends well for the humans.”

“I don’t suppose _you_ _’ve_ ever done anything like that?” asked the woman, and Aziraphale’s expression answered for him. “Oh, of course you haven’t. You’re actually _nice_. My bad.”

“Forced worship stinks in God’s nostrils,” said Aziraphale, suddenly every bit an angel, “But it seems H'aaztre didn’t succeed in binding your will. Perhaps something else got its bid in too; I rather think it did. And so you were left to wander, with your curses and your gifts, making the best of things as humans will. Until some time last year.”

Lisa Morrow stared at him. She nodded, once. “Go on.”

“Some time last year you became aware of my existence, and the drive to Summon an Eldritch being, embedded in you by Hastur, transferred itself — most unfortunately — to _me_. During an attempt to forage a Sigil of mine from a skip in Mayfair, you met what I presume to have been your first actual demon. The Sigil was broken, the demon was no politer than demons usually are, and you attempted to discorporate him with a flatscreen television. You also swore at him in what I assume to have been the Old Speech. Brought the fellow out in a rash.”

“A demon. An actual demon. It’s not enough for _you_ to exist, or H'aaztre to exist, _everything_ has to exist. Vampires? Werewolves? Bloody unicorns?”

“Unicorns are extinct. An unfortunate business all round.”

“Okay, so everything has to exist, providing it’s horrible.”

“As I said before, existence is not quite as bad as that, and I’ve seen a lot of it. I believe that we have been brought together for,” Aziraphale flailed a little, “a Higher Purpose.”

Lisa Morrow set down her mug of tea, and gave Aziraphale a look so old-fashioned it had probably be born in Ur.

“You know, _H_ _’zr aph’aal,_ ” she announced sourly, “I had my doubts about you being a real angel. But this settles it. You definitely are one. ‘Cos I’ve met timeshare sellers, and I’ve met sales reps, and I’ve met people who reckon all life’s problems can be cured with aloe vera…but to sling that Higher Purpose tosh with a straight face, you need to have religion. I’ve seen places no mortal eyes should see, you daft, glowing, platitudinous sod. I know what’s out there, and it’s too bloody weird for words. I do not need compulsory Mindfulness chat from _you_.”

Aziraphale stared at her.

“Oh, poot,” he murmured faintly. And in a rush, back came the reason Lisa Morrow’s voice was familiar. It was the voice that had uttered that mysterious, mundane, and deeply human message that Aziraphale’s computer wizard had pulled from Crowley’s answering machine, an awful year ago: ‘ _Oh, poot. Dad, why don_ _’t you ever pick up? It’s not rocket science. Anyway, I won’t be able to make it on Monday, we’ve got compulsory Mindfulness. Yes, yes, I know, but I’ll bring your freezer packs round on Wednesday. Three pasandas, three tuna bakes, and the rest is bolognese, I’m afraid. Make sure you put out the recycling bin’._

Aziraphale knew that astonishment was an unbecoming expression for an angel. What he meant to say was something like: _Dear lady, this is unprecedented. This is mysterious, even for me. This is a coincidence so wildly improbable that it cannot actually be happening, but if it was happening, and if I had a certain tattooed pizza demon and his infernal calculator handy, I think it would clock in at around 1.85 kiloFiglocks. Perhaps a touch more..._

What he said was: “Your father hates spaghetti bolognese.”

“ _What?”_

“Your father is one of the few human beings who regards bolognese with indifference, if not active disdain, preferring the curries of the late Mughal Empire.”

“Bloody Hell,” said the woman who’d been unimpressed by pseudopods and miracles, “now that’s specific. Poor old Trev. How on Earth did you know _that_?”

“There we go,” said Aziraphale with relief, “I _knew_ I’d heard your voice somewhere. ‘ _Three pasandas, three tuna bakes, and the rest is bolognese_ _’ — a_ nd then something about a putting out a recycling bin, if I recall correctly. I do hope he didn’t forget.”

“He didn’t forget. Got recycled himself, didn’t he?” She paused, seeing incomprehension on Aziraphale’s face. “He _died_ , you Eldritch twat. Us lot tend to. Now, if it’s not too much trouble, I wouldn’t mind knowing if you’ve been spying on my entire life? Or just the bits that are important in the scheme of things? Have you listened to all my phone calls? Read all my emails? Checked in on my excuse for a love life? ‘Cos if _this_ is what it’s like to have a guardian angel, I think I’d like to unsubscribe.”

Aziraphale stared at her all over again. “Oh, Heavens. My dear girl. Forgive me. I’ve been quite unforgivably selfish.”

———————————————————

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So...here, _at bloody last, people,_ is telesales agent Lisa Morrow, a character from the scrapings of Good Omen's plot saucepan. She's mostly Book Lisa, because we know more about Book Lisa. Perhaps it's just me, but I felt that just before writing Lisa and her snack-pack of colleagues, either Pratchett or Gaiman must’ve just suffered a long marketing call or some root canal work, because it’s _savage_ about folk whose teenage dreams don’t mesh with reality, and who become — the horror! — dental assistants, or — the horror! the horror! — call centre workers.
> 
> Getting devoured by maggots, spontaneously combusting on the M25, or crashing into a pile of fish on a motorbike (a death sadly omitted from the TV cut) are fun ways to die in an Apocalypse. Getting dumped on in an authorial aside for having a particular job, felt…off. And unlike Aziraphale’s bookshop, Crowley’s Bentley, or Newt's car, Book Lisa doesn't get any, um, _interesting_ side-effects from being restored by the Anti-Antichrist.
> 
> So that’s why she’s here, I guess, though at present she probably wishes she wasn't. Also, I was bothered by the fate of Sgt. Thomas A. Deisenburger, who we never see again in the TV version after Aziraphale vanished him (in the book, he's miracled back to his family farm, and it's implied he decides to stay). What _did_ you do with Deisenburger, TV Aziraphale? We need answers.
> 
> \---
> 
> A note to Mythos nerds: yeah, H’zr aph’aal's native language should probably be Aklo, oldest and most powerful of all Eldritch tongues, but a) it's a tradition in Mythos tales that (although you can apparently say 'Hastur' as much as you like) you _never_ write down Aklo, and b) R'lyehian/Cthuvian has gone into most peoples' minds (mine included) as the uncanny language _par excellence_. So it's back to the old _Ia! Ia!_ , a value pack of apostrophes, and for once in my life I'll indulge in glitchtext too. Crazy times, y'all.


	7. Check your lucky numbers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It is a popular belief that Satan is the inventor of the answering machine.
> 
> This is very unfair to Satan.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> After a lot of faffing, I broke one massive chapter 7 into chapters 7 and 8. But they're both going up today. Oh yes.

As Lisa Morrow and Aziraphale were having their subterranean tea, a van trundled through Hampshire, down the sort of lanes to which Chesterton wrote paeans: meandering, crowded in by hedges, and impossible to get down at speed. The van made leisurely progress. It will not surprise anyone to learn that the driver was employed by International Express (though he was not _the_ International Express man — that gentleman having retired after the Great Postponement, on discovering that an ineffably hideous vase inherited from his great-aunt, in form resembling a gigantic owl pellet, was a lost masterpiece by the Martin Brothers).

It might be somewhat less expected that there was another man in the seat beside him, peering incredulously at a clipboard bearing a delivery address.

Picking up hitch-hikers was against company policy, but as the International Express man had driven towards what felt more and more like his doom, stealing the occasional glance at the single parcel beside him, he’d found himself keen to not be alone with that particular parcel any longer than he had to be. Nothing wrapped in brown paper and tied up with string had a right to feel so — portentous, he supposed. That was the word for it.

But he was loyal to his company. He’d _nearly_ managed to drive past the broken-down Triumph Stag — a classic 70’s motor, and notoriously unreliable — with steam trickling from under its cherry-red bonnet, and its owner pacing disconsolately beside it. He _would_ have carried right on, had said owner not been holding out a card sign hopefully scrawled ‘Clopton Stoke?’, and looking as if he too was having one of the least lucky days of his life.

The International Express man had pulled over, and popped open the passenger door. The hitch-hiker had wire-framed specs and trainers a touch too hip for a man in his forties, and carried a laptop backpack. He looked like the result of a teleporting accident involving a folk rocker and an accountant, and he was wearing a T-Shirt emblazoned ‘Stoked!’.

“Seems we’re headed the same way,” commiserated the International Express man. “Hop in, then, and see if you can make head or tail of _this_ thing.”

And he’d handed his passenger the clipboard, just to make sure he wasn’t hallucinating the address. It read:

A Mysterious Pit

A Hole in the Fence (Please ignore warning sign)

Dene Meadow

Clopton Stoke

SP12 9AX

Hampshire

U.K.

Europe

Earth (Please ignore warning sign)

The Solar System

Next Door to Alpha Centauri

Orion-Cygnus Arm

The Milky Way

Laniakea Supercluster

The Universe

SPACE

It looked like the sort of thing a precocious child might put together, but packages with similar instructions had become part of International Express folklore. Although no-one knew where the Rules to deal with them came from, there were definitely Rules: the directions were to be followed to the letter, there _would_ be someone waiting to sign, and if you tried quietly dumping such a parcel rather than delivering it (not that any International Express employee would ever try such a thing), you’d come back to your van and find it on the passenger seat. Repeatedly. Until you went insane — and even then, you’d probably still have to deliver the parcel.

Since they are not bound by rules of time and space, most miracles seem instantaneous to humans. Many genuinely are, but few of those change the world in any important way. Any jobbing angel, Fallen or otherwise, can snap their fingers in lieu of remembering their keys, carrying change, or being a responsible adult. In contrast, the really ineffable miracles, vaster than empires and more slow, can take millennia to achieve their inscrutable objectives. But many miracles are somewhere in between, and like to get some legwork in before they’re formally invoked.

The van did not get lost, exactly, but Clopton Stoke appeared to be one of those villages with a mind of its own about how easy it was going to be to find. The place could be heard before it was seen — sundry yelps and bass thumpings, and the sing-along whoops of a not very discriminating, but highly enthusiastic crowd. The International Express man didn’t go in for such entertainments himself, but he found himself comforted by the idea that a field or so over from Dene Meadow, people were having a nice day of it.

“At least they got the party started,” observed the hitch-hiker, who’d perked up considerably. “Could drop me off at the corner? Where it says ‘This Way to the Festival’ — and when I find out who typeset that in Comic Sans, they’ll be sorry. I swear to God.”

Behind a clump of ancient oaks rose the outline of a marquee tent, crowned with multicoloured flags which gave it a tatterdemalion charm.

“You’ve saved my life,” said the hitchhiker, as his natty trainers crunched onto the gravel. "Or at very least, my LinkedIn profile. What can I do to thank you? You should get yourself a newer phone, the GPS on that one’s knackered.”

The International Express man mulled it over, and glanced to where the yet-to-be-delivered parcel sat, still trying its best to look ordinary. He wondered if this sort of job was strictly within his pay grade — or anyone else’s, for that matter.

“I don’t believe the the company would like me to take money, Sir. But maybe it’d be all right if you just wished me luck?”

* * *

It is a popular belief that Satan is the inventor of the answering machine.

This is unfair to Satan.

The jury is out on the question of whether or not the Almighty could create a stone beyond Her power to lift, but to give everyone’s prayers proper attention, even the Almighty needs call waiting. The first answering machine was, in fact, created by God, who intended to give the Metatron a snazzy welcome message, except that supervising the Universe got in the way.

When the first of all Recording Angels developed a personality, God did not have the heart to change it, and theologians have speculated that the Metatron’s winning manner has influenced answering machines ever since. People are _discouraged_ by answering machines. No-one can think up a snappy greeting, _no-one_ likes leaving a message after the tone, and hardly anyone in recorded history has seen that little light winking on and off, and thought, ‘Wahoo! This is bound to be excellent news!’.

Judging from his daughter’s description, the late Trevor Morrow, six years a widower, enthusiast for cherry tobacco, public libraries, and the Telegraph crossword, and disdainer of bolognese, had been no exception. Every frozen meal or pack of new socks arranged by his exasperated child had come as a surprise to Mr. Morrow, because although Lisa had bought him an answering machine — one of those off-white, dome-shaped ones with a miniature tape window and an integrated handset — she was pretty certain he’d never listened to a single message she left for him. On the occasions she’d zipped through the tape to see if there was anything important on it (there never was), there’d usually been about one spare minute of recording time, and a lot of her own frustrated voice.

“Nonetheless, you did your duty,” pointed out Aziraphale, “and that deserves a commendation.” Too late, he remembered that he wasn’t talking to an employee of either Upstairs or Downstairs, and that this might sound a tad patronising.

“A bloody _commendation?”_

Aziraphale had heard that tone before. Half of it came from looking after a person who did not take nearly such good care of themselves as you’d like them to, and the other half came from being congratulated on doing it when it wasn’t as if you had much choice in the matter.

“Are you about to tell me I’ll get my reward in Heaven?” she snapped. “Because if you are, you Abominable dipstick — ”

“I wouldn’t dare. And just between ourselves, it’s possible that the reason particular human souls go to particular afterlives, is so that Heaven and Hell occasionally get some new ideas. They have such difficulty coming up with any of their own.”

That wasn’t Aziraphale’s notion, of course. It had been one of the many theories Crowley had come up with to explain why, among other Ineffable matters, the best choreographers went to Heaven, but only one angel had ever learned to dance.

“Well, they’ll have to timeshare on Dad, then, ‘cos half his ideas were brilliant, and half of them were batshit. If he’d only been able to tell one from the other, he might’ve been famous.” Lisa Morrow looked regretful, and the Eldritch light in the dene-hole took on a sympathetic mauve tinge. “It was his heart that did for him, in the end, and I wasn’t even there. Wasn’t ‘til months after the funeral that I had the heart to go through all the stuff from his flat.”

“You wondered if you might have done more? Or you were feeling unappreciated?”

“Bit of both.” She gave a wry smile. “For someone who’s never worked in sales, you’re not half bad at reading people. I got to thinking — did I really do all that for Dad, and…well, _why?_ It’s not like he was grateful. His answer message was _‘Trev Morrow can’t take your call for the foreseeable, so bugger off after the tone’._ ” And then I got to wondering how many of my messages he’d actually listened to.”

“Archangels sometimes have similar suspicions about the Almighty,” admitted Aziraphale. “It doesn’t do wonders for their mood.”

“Well, I hope none of them expect sympathy from _me_. Unless your high-ups have to go through God’s sock drawer, and swap out all the ones with holes.”

_If that wass true, it’d explain lotsss about Gabriel,_ mused Crowley’s voice at the back of Aziraphale’s mind _. Holier than Thou, indeed._

 _What on Earth are_ you _doing here, foul fiend?_

 _What, apart from watching you get a ticking-off from an actual live human? Which is unexpectedly entertaining, by the way. I’m waiting for_ you _to work out that there’s sssomething you shouldn’t know. Can’t believe a clever angel like you hassn’t worked it out yet.”_

_“Now look here, Crowley…”_

"H̡’̷͡z͘͞͏r aph͏̧̡’͜a͟͡al͜!" said a woman’s voice, interrupting his reverie.

Aziraphale became aware that something was flashing and glinting in his corporation’s eyes. It was Lisa Morrow’s glittery Altoids-tin locket, catching the cavern’s otherworldly glow like a talisman.

“Hey! You still in there, H’zr aph — I mean, Aziraphale?” She was leaning forward over the miraculously spindly bistro table, waving a hand in front of his face. “Talk to me. Before I have to see if your Eldritch half knows sign language.”

Aziraphale blinked.

“You said that name again,” accused the erstwhile vendor of wall insulation. “You said _‘Crowley’._ You say it as if he’s _here_. What sort of demon is he, really?”

“Demon?” squeaked Aziraphale, in a tone unbecoming to either an angel, or an Abominable dipstick. “What…whatever gave you the impression that Crowley might be a _demon?_ ”

“I don’t need to be Sherlock Holmes,” she snorted. “It was you who told me demons exist, remember? Crowley is someone who knows your _actual name._ And he gets the apostrophes right, but he’s not an Abomination — Crowley’s not an Eldritch name, for starters. You obviously like him, but you think you shouldn’t, so he’s no angel either. But Hastur knew who he was, and Hastur’s a demonic Abomination. So I’m going to take a wild guess, keep the ‘demonic’ bit, strike out the ‘Abomination’ bit, and conclude that the the mysterious Mr. Anthony Crowley has, at some point, been on the payroll of the Wrong Place.”

That wasn’t bad going for someone who considered themselves a fool. But something still didn’t make _sense_. Aziraphale — who’d never considered himself a fool — found himself mentally scrabbling at the same sort of causality snarl-up he’d last tussled with when it turned out that the Witchfinder Army worked for both Heaven and Hell.

“But…I thought you said you’d called Crowley’s answerphone years ago?” he objected, “and from your place of work, just around the time of the Ap— the appalling business with Hastur? How can Crowley possibly have called you back last year?”

Lisa Morrow looked uncomfortable. “Okay. This is going to sound mad. I mean, completely barmy potty even by your standards, but — ”

“I have very high standards.”

“ — Crowley called my Dad. He called Trev Morrow, of Nine Elms, Wandsworth. I mean, _maybe_ Dad was a top demonologist and just forgot to mention it, but it really didn’t seem that Crowley was expecting to get through to his number. That was what was at the end of the tape, you see. A pissed-off message from your demon boyfriend, and…an instruction to find _you._ I’m sorry I didn’t listen to it sooner.”

One of the tasks of both angels and demons is to keep tabs on humans with magical abilities. Aziraphale racked his brain to see if he could have somehow have overlooked the existence of a powerful diabolist named Trevor Morrow, who’d lived less than a mile from his own bookshop, didn’t like bolognese, and had somehow been personally known to the Serpent of Eden. It didn’t seem likely.

“Crowley was never my boyfr—,” started Aziraphale, only to bring himself up short when he recalled that lying was off-brand, and also that Lisa Morrow was one of the few people in the world with whom he could be frank. “Oh, Heavens. You believe Crowley called your late father _entirely by accident?_ ”

She looked uncertain. “Well, that’s what it sounded like. But what are the chances _?_ ”

 _Sufficiently improbable to require a miraculous coincidence of about fifteen hundred Figlocks,_ thought Aziraphale, _at the bare minimum. There shouldn’t be that amount of unaffiliated miraculous power toddling about the Earth, so clever that neither Heaven nor Hell are aware of it, and disguised as a series of coincidences that listened to a hasty prayer commissioned by an Eldritch angel for a rather eccentric demon. Could such a prayer possibly, by some Ineffable chance, have been…answered?_

“Closure,” said Lisa Morrow. “That’s what you’re supposed to get when you lose someone, isn’t it?”

“I’ve never been fond of the term.”

“Me neither. But God help me, I tried. Check the tape one last time, I told myself, and then chuck the machine away for good. So I did — and there was this message. I’d not heard Crowley’s voice before, but the thing was, I sort of _knew_ it was him? It sounded as if he was panicking, like he’d made a really big mistake, and there was so much flash talk, he didn’t manage to give your full number. But he did manage to give your name. Your _real_ name. And like I said, he managed to get the apostrophes right, to about the only mortal soul who’d know — Aziraphale, you’re getting that funny look on your face again. Talk to me.”

“Bolognese,” exclaimed the angel suddenly, sitting bolt upright. “I have been an idiot. I have allowed myself to lose heart when I had been given a clue all along, but now, let me tell you, I have had an epiphany. The key to this whole affair is the mysterious Bolognese Message.”

“Is this some sort of angel joke? ‘Cos I’m not sure I get it.”

“I’m not certain that I do — not completely — but I will do my utmost.” Aziraphale finished his tea. “There is method in this madness, I know there is. We just have to set it in page order. Let us start with the reason Crowley called your father’s answering machine in the first place. What was Trevor’s telephone number?”

Lisa Morrow gave it. It started with 020 7498, which as mentioned an Ineffably long time ago, is very similar to the area code for Mayfair, which is 020 7499. As Aziraphale finished reciting the number, Lisa Morrow shivered.

“One digit different. I mean, it _must_ have been like that forever and a day, but — ” she broke off. “That’s just spooky.”

“Spooky? Oh, I’m just getting started. On the twenty-first of June, one year ago, Crowley called your father’s number by accident, and as you said, that is wildly unlikely considering that you and Crowley were already…ahem…fatefully associated. For Crowley to misdial his own number in the first place, he must have somehow lost his portable telephone and found a public one, which is also unlikely, but miraculous spare change in the scale of this whole business. At the same time, I was making my way to Crowley’s residence, where I feared he would fall foul of another demon with a longstanding grudge against him — ”

Lisa Morrow’s eyes grew wider. “And you’re going to tell me that demon was Hastur. ‘Cos this whole business is too weird for it not to have been that same maggoty bastard who arsed my life up years ago. It _was_ Hastur, wasn’t it?”

“If all human students of the arcane learned at this speed, I’d have my work cut out, I can tell you,” replied Aziraphale warmly. “It was indeed that misguided and Abominable duke, and by the time I got to Crowley’s domicile — I — I thought I was too late. Hastur had doused all Crowley’s refuges in holy water.”

“Holy water _actually works_ on demons? Like it does in films?”

“Folklore must get some things right, dear lady, if only by accident. On that self-same day, _you_ called Crowley’s safety number by a misdial, shortly before Hastur’s arrival, and left a message for your father on Crowley’s reserve answerphone, the number of which was known only to Crowley and myself. And there, as a wise man said, is the rub. I can’t tell you how baffled I was by your message about mindfulness and bolognese and recycling bins, but I never should have been. That — and I should have known it — was a miracle. A completely superfluous and rather stylish one, and let me tell you, nothing capable of _that_ sort of effect is worried about running through its miracle budget.” He broke off. “Not to be rude, dear lady, but you are staring at me again.”

“That’s because there are sparks in your hair, H’zr aph’aal. Literal sparks.”

“I do beg your pardon. That was a great deal of thinking in rather a short time.” Aziraphale ran a hand through his curls (they definitely felt _different_ , somehow) and the scintillations went out. “Lisa Morrow, exactly how long have you spent searching for me?”

“Seven months, two weeks, five days. Ever since I got that cursed bloody message of Crowley’s. And if there’s one weird trick for Summoning eldritch abominations without any fuss, I think I’d prefer not to know.”

“There is not,” said Aziraphale. “Oh, poor child. You must trust me that — I simply cannot believe that Crowley would ever curse anyone deliberately with an Eldritch compulsion. To be frank, I’d be surprised if he actually knew how. He must have done it by accident.”

The reluctant speaker of R'lyehian and Former Devoureree of Hastur the Unspeakable looked around the dene-hole, where a few stray clusters of eyes (not of the fanged variety) were hanging like grapes, watching her intently.

“For example, by saying an abomination’s True Name in a panic?” she said. “To someone who can actually understand it?”

Aziraphale and the eye-clusters blinked in synchrony. “Yes. Well. That would probably do it.”

Lisa Morrow sighed. “D’you know, if Crowley had managed to give me your full phone number, instead of ranting like an idiot, even I might’ve actually tried ringing it? Instead of trying to Summon an Abomination in a language I shouldn’t even know, using a Sigil I hadn’t even got? But from what I’d got to work with, it was a Soho number. So I started looking in Soho. Found naff all, though I assume you do have a base there — ”

“A bookshop. A real one, with proper books, but it’s warded to deflect human attention when I’m not there. No wonder you failed to find it.”

 _Even though it had ‘A. Z. Fell’ over the door,_ thought Aziraphale guiltily, _in gilded letters. Perhaps I warded it a tad too strongly._

“— now _that_ would’ve been handy to know. But there was a Sigil of H’zr aph’aal in the neighbourhood, I could feel it. So I kept going outwards in a spiral, figuring that I’d sense the blasted thing better as I got nearer. And bingo, a Sigil of H’zr aph’aal — in Mayfair, of all places, except some tattooed dangleberry of a demon had smashed it in two and bunged it in a skip. That was a rough day. You can’t blame me for chucking a telly at him. And all the time, this blasted tape was weighing heavier and heavier on me.”

She unlooped the bedizened Altoids-tin locket from her neck. It was covered in lozenge-shaped sequins that looked, from a distance, rather like scales.

“My niece flogs these on Ebay. _Upcycling_ , she calls it. I call it gluing tat to other tat — but the thing is, no-one in their right mind would want to nick it. And that’s good, because I’ve been looking after it like it was my life on a string. But really, it’s meant for you, I think. A present from Crowley,” she popped the tin open, “the utter, utter, utter wanker.”

And she laid the contents in the Eldritch angel’s palm. It was a much smaller and newer cassette tape than the one in the only answering machine Crowley had ever owned — the machine he’d had expensively serviced more than once, because he knew its idiosyncratic rotations by heart and didn’t trust a miracle not to even them out. This was a tiny tape, barely more than an inch long. Aziraphale put it in the breast pocket of his AD/BC T-shirt (which hadn’t had a such a pocket five seconds earlier, but since Aziraphale wasn’t aware that all shirts didn’t come with breast pockets, there it was).

 _Please don’t be a false dawn,_ he thought, with a wild hope that was almost painful. _Be tangible proof that things aren’t quite what they seem. Please, please, please._

“Okay, so what’s on here, really, besides a load of me slagging off my dear old Dad?” asked Lisa Morrow. “Because there’s…something, isn’t there? Something really important. You look like I just handed you the key to a kingdom.”

Aziraphale swallowed. “I was hoping it might be _someone_. I may be mistaken. The natural history of Biblical demons — or angels, for that matter — is different from mine, you see, and it’s possible that, although it would be a rather cramped existence, and uncomfortable to maintain for a full year, the tape may still contain some residuum of — ”

“ — Crowley,” concluded Lisa Morrow. “That was his safe-house, and somehow the least bogglesome bit of this whole business is that a demon can fit itself on a minicassette if it really wants to.”

“He did say that it could pinch a little.”

Her voice became more careful. “Aziraphale, I’ve listened to that tape, remember. There’s a lot of me nagging Trevor to take better care of himself, and then there’s one message with Crowley going off the deep end, and then…it goes quiet. Really quiet. If Crowley was ever on there, I’m not sure he is now. And even if he is, he’ll have been on there alone for a year.”

Aziraphale did not have Crowley’s skill in hoping against hope, but you didn’t spend millennia in the company of a combat optimist without learning a few things. He felt a rising, stubborn sense that he hadn’t felt in months — a sense that things might possibly turn out all right after all.

“Shall we find out?” he said quietly.

“Find out how? I haven’t been hoiking a bloody answering machine about with me for seven months, in case you’re wondering.”

“Not an insuperable difficulty,” replied the angel modestly. “For example, I _could_ summon the machine that this tape remembers being in for the past half-decade, to come to my presence miraculously and instantly. But the thing about miracles is that the more specific you are about the exact way things should happen, the more power you have to use. I generally prefer to let a miracle take its own course, but I should warn you that what you’re about to witness is going to be something that even you don’t see every day. Prepare to be amazed, Lisa Morrow. One. Two Three. And…Abracadabra!”

Aziraphale snapped his fingers with a very pretty flourish, but without immediate result. Lisa Morrow waited a couple of awkward minutes. Then a couple more. Absolutely nothing happened, and she’d begun to get the polite-audience look the angel recalled from certain mishaps he’d had as a conjuror, when from above them, and faintly, a man’s very nervous voice called, “Hello? Parcel delivery?”

“Whoops,” whispered Aziraphale. “Oh, well. Mysterious ways, and all that, but I really don’t think I should bring him down here. I may have to miracle you to the surface while he’s looking in the other direction.”

Lisa Morrow pressed one palm against the side of the dene-hole; it came away covered in chalk. “I don’t think you’ll need do that.”

“Dear lady, we cannot ask that fellow to simply throw the parcel in! No doubt it will have to be signed-for.”

“I mean, I don’t think you’ll need to do that, because in my estimation, we’re already five feet in the air. And going up.”

She was bang to rights. Aziraphale looked down between his sandalled feet, which were dangling over a modest drop, and then up at the leafy branches framing the June sky above them. The table and the chairs they were sitting on were ascending in perfect synchrony, gripped by a selection of indescribable appendages that you needed to look very closely at to see they were made from innumerable eyes.

“Gosh,” said the Abominable angel. “Hadn’t even noticed I was doing that. My Eldritch side must have taken the initiative.”

“Quite a trick, that. You ever need to find another job, give me a call. I can probably get you a gig as a rising stage.”

\----------

The International Express man had parked up his van in a lay-by, and made his way through knee-high wet grass, making a beeline for the fenced-off little coppice in the corner. When he got about half-way, he saw that someone had preceded him, cutting across from a stile from the festival field. When they’d got to the fence, they’d made a hole in it, apparently by unpicking the chain-link like wire knitting, just below the 1940’s enamel sign (miraculously legible and free of rust) that said THIS HISTORIC SITE IS IN THE GUARDIANSHIP OF THE MINISTRY OF WORKS. NO ENTRY. The hole was big enough for a person to squeeze though, but not so big that it would be easy to scramble through in a hurry, it if whatever was on the other side meant him no good. The International Express man tried his best not to think about this. His predecessors had either delivered or collected from war zones, subterranean temples, airborne zeppelins, plague-stricken citadels, too many impenetrable top-secret security facilities to count, and one erupting volcano. This was a corner of a field, next to a music festival. How bad could it possibly be?

It is never a good idea to ask oneself that question in the vicinity of anything Eldritch. He had barely got one step further before the hairs on the back of his neck stood up, and despite the warmth of the afternoon, he shuddered.

“Hello?” he announced again, feeling foolishly afraid.

If he dawdled any longer, he’d lose his nerve completely, so he took a deep breath and scrambled through the hole, into the glade beyond. The scent of sun-warmed leaves and honeysuckle rose up around him. It didn’t exactly feel sinister, but neither did it feel normal. It felt _charged_ , as if this place was sacred to some forgotten power, or there was an alien spacecraft buried just under the Hampshire loam. Although the International Express man did not know it, this is a normal human reaction to being in the proxmity of the Mythos. He was too busy thinking about the fact that when you are summoned to deliver a portentous parcel to a hole in the ground, things can only go two ways. Either the parcel goes into it…or something ends up coming out to meet you.

Because _something_ was slowly rising from the depths of the old chalk-mine. The International Express man knew it in his bones. He wondered if he was allowed to scream now, and if that would make things better or worse — except that he never did, because what was about to emerge from the pit sounded as if it was actually be two things, and they were deep in conversation.

“…and I am almost certainly too fond of this old place,” explained the first voice — light, educated, and male. “It moves me deeply. I would give all of myself to protect it.”

“A coppice next to a field next to a shitty music festival?” said a woman’s voice incredulously. “Oh. _Oh_. You mean _this_ old place. As in the World, the Universe, Space, sort of thing. Sorry, I’m seem to have gone stupid again.”

“In my experience, people who say such things about themselves, are far from stupid — but have been told otherwise with considerable frequency.”

The _something_ gradually rising from the pit wasn’t horrible at all, as it turned out, merely bizarre: a man and a woman, seated on a couple of folding chairs, and holding camping mugs. As this odd group reached ground level, the woman gave The International Express man a nod of greeting, and set down her mug on the spindly table that hovered between her and her companion.

“I’m not going to ask how _that_ happened,” she remarked to him, getting out of her seat, which bobbed behind her as if on springs. “And if you’ve got any sense, neither are you.”

Her companion — a portly hippie type — joined her with an alacrity improbable for a man of his build, his mouth open in an ‘O’ of perfect astonishment. International Express delivery men are not used to being gazed upon as if they’re unexpected A-listers, or some sort of supernatural manifestation, or perhaps just the most beautiful thing the beholder has ever seen. The man’s startled expression was replaced by a blinding smile.

“Good Lord!” he exclaimed, holding out his hand for the clipboard. “Well, _this_ is an honour I’ve done nothing to deserve. Always a pleasure to do business with your splendid organisation, mind you.”

“We aim to meet expectations, Sir, so I must apologise for the delay. Set out hours ago, I really did, but you know what country lanes are like. And also — ahem — the signee ought to be a Ms. Morrow?”

“I see,” said the old hippie, a tad crestfallen, and then he turned to the woman apologetically. “I just thought that for once in my existence, such a parcel might actually be for _me_. Silly, really. It does contain _your_ property, after all. Of course it must be you who signs for it.”

And the woman stepped forward and signed for the parcel, just like that. Nothing revelatory happened. The International Express man handed her the goods, and both she and her fellow eccentric bade him a polite farewell, and then he picked his way back through the coppice, the hole in the fence, and the meadow, and nothing ghastly happened to him at all. The clouds scudded and the June breeze blew, carrying snatches of enthusiastic yelps and twangs to his ears. Paste were just finishing up their set with a good old crowd-pleaser —

“ _Misshapes, mistakes, misfits_

_Raised on a diet of broken biscuits, oooooh_

_we don't look the same as you_

_And we don't do the things you do_

_But we live around here too…”_

_Tartan hair,_ he mused to himself, as he got back into his van. _Why is that the thing that bothers me?_

Because that man in the AD/BC T-shirt and awful trousers had had _tartan_ hair. Not a spray dye, either. It was artfully done in sky-blue and sage, but the last person he’d seen with anything similar had been well under twenty and wearing a crop top. Welcome to the Twenty-First Century, he supposed, where age is just a number, people levitate inexplicably out of holes, and for some ineffable bloody reason that’s not the first thing that strikes you as weird.


	8. Ansaphone

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Traditional grimoires are silent on the question of how to Summon recalcitrant entities from a possessed cassette tape.
> 
> The more newfangled ones suggest switching the apparatus off, then switching it back on again.
> 
> And if _that_ doesn't work, you probably need a celebrant with Particular Skills.

Lisa Morrow sat on the trunk of a long-fallen oak that lay next to Aziraphale’s subterranean residence, parcel on her lap, and attempted to open it. Whoever had wrapped it up had really, _really_ liked string. Like other parcels of its mysterious ilk, this one also had a smudged postmark and a blurred return address.

“Aziraphale, if that man started out delivering this parcel _hours_ ago, and you only asked me about Dad’s answerphone _minutes_ ago — flaming heck, who even _tied_ these knots — then what was in the box when he set out this morning?” She got that look on her face that indicated the pondering of some Ineffable conundrum. “This is going to turn out to be one of those questions there’s no good answer to, isn’t it?”

“At your core, you are a profoundly sensible person.” Aziraphale snapped his fingers, and sent the bistro table and chairs back to whatever holy props department they’d come from. “ _Experto crede_ , I’ve been employed by Heaven since history began, and I promise, not thinking about miracles work has saved no end of fuss. You don’t _think_ about miracles, you see. You just do them.”

“Or have them done to you,” pointed out the woman who’d been devoured by abholy maggots (and also reconstituted by the Antichrist). “Make yourself useful, then, and miracle this bloody parcel open.”

A chastened angel sat beside her, and did so. The interior was filled with biodegradable packing peanuts. There seemed to be more of them than a box that size could reasonably contain, and they had to be removed by handfuls.

“Can I ask you a question you _might_ have an answer to?” said Lisa Morrow. “It might sound pretty stupid, mind.”

“It cannot be sillier than some of the questions I’ve put to humans in my time.”

She didn’t look convinced. “All right. Well then. Um…it’s about Heaven. I can’t believe I’m asking you this, I mean, I absolutely do believe you’re a proper, paid-up angel and you know what you’re talking about, but…well… _Heaven._ Is it, you know…all it’s cracked up to be?” She sounded hopeful and worried at the same time. “Does it even exist?”

“It does. And I have every reason to believe it is all it’s cracked up to be.”

“ _Every reason to_ — look, I’m not imaginative,” she said, “so I suppose I always pictured it as a really nice holiday resort, but for dead people. But you actually know if that’s true.”

“As I said, I believe it to be a very pleasant destination,” said Aziraphale, a touch too brightly. “But I’ve been awfully busy thwarting evil, delivering ecstacies, and averting — um, unfortunate events. Never spent all that much time there, to be honest.”

Angels are not prone to fibbing, but they may prevaricate, temporize, and invoke a little retroactive continuity to deal with awkward questions. The question most often posed to an angel is ‘How did you do _that_?’, followed by ‘And who the heck are _you_?’, but long-serving field agents must tackle such posers as ‘When were you born?’, ‘What is your mother’s maiden name?’, and ‘Just how long has this bookshop been here, anyway?’

Few beings can be as economical with the truth as an angel who’d rather not answer your question, but telesales workers come a close second. Lisa Morrow got a look on her face that Aziraphale had learned to dread: the look of a fellow bullshitter who is about to call one on one’s bullshit.

“Not _much_ time,” she said, sweet and acid as a lemon sherbet. “I get it. A few thousand years, maybe?”

“Um. Honestly, I _have_ seen it once or twice. From a safe distance. You must understand that I’m — well, I suppose I’m still what Heaven would consider a temporary hire. Even after all this time. I suppose I ought to have read the contract a little more closely.”

“Right. You’ve spent six thousand years flogging a destination you’ve seen once or twice, _from a distance?_ ”

“I suppose, when you put it like that, it does sound a bit — ”

“What was your closing rate?” She saw the incomprehension flit across his face. “You’re an angel. A _payroll_ angel, a professional. Not someone who just got born into the family firm. So — of the people you tried to get to mend their ways, tread the One True path, and so on, how many went and did it?”

“Do you know, Upper Management never tell us that?”

A harrumph. She pulled out more packing peanuts. “If you have to drag it out of them, you’re good, but they don’t want to say so. Probably deserve a promotion. Someone else will have nabbed it by now.”

Aziraphale reflected that this was likely, but he was not about to be lectured by a mortal. Not even _this_ mortal.

“The thing is — and I feel that you are in a unique position to appreciate my predicament — there’s no form I can take in Heaven that wouldn’t be at least a bit, well — ‘off-brand’, is the way my Dominion used to tactfully put it. So no, forgive me, I have not shambled about the afterlife like the surprise ending of a glorious dream, where everything is simply wonderful where you happen to be, but — ”

“ — but you know the things from your nightmares exist as well. Maybe not in Heaven. Maybe far, far away. But _somewhere_ , they exist.”

“Just so,” replied the Eldritch angel seriously, “and I suppose that’s part of the reason I’m down here on Earth. Heaven’s own Guardian Nightmare, if you will.”

“Oh! I didn’t mean _you_. You’re not so bad.” She pulled out the final handful of packing, and her lacquered nails hit plastic. “And here it is. Dad’s answering machine, which I last saw under my stairs cupboard at home, weeks ago, and was just delivered by an actual human who collected it from…oh, sod it! I will not think about how this works. I will _not_ think about how this works.”

Aziraphale smiled. “You, my dear, are a natural talent.”

________

The answering machine had probably once been white, or something close to it, but after years in the company of the late Trevor Morrow, it had absorbed such a payload of nicotine that it looked like the egg of a dinosaur with a thirty-a-day habit. Lisa Morrow lifted it reverently out of the box, and set it down between them, on the trunk of the fallen oak.

“That was impressive,” she said. “Like it needn’t have happened by magic at all, if you don’t think about it for too long. Much better than levitating or being in two places at once or that sort of religious bollocks. Not show-offy, but actually useful.”

“One does one’s best.” It had been over a year, Aziraphale realised, since anyone who knew what he was had said anything so nice to him. He would, in the circumstance, overlook the comment about religious bollocks.

“D’you know what’d be even more impressive?” She said. “If we had some way of plugging it in.”

The angel smiled, and snapped his fingers, and the answering machine powered itself up with a startled beep.

“I take it back about you not being a show-off.”

“Well, after all, dear lady, _fiat flux_ only needs a single extra letter.” He handed her the tape. “Since Crowley has put you to so much trouble, I think the person who does the honours ought to be you.”

Lisa Morrow opened the tape deck, and fitted the tape with trembling fingers. “I’m really not sure this is going to work,” she said.

“It will work, because I _believe_ it will work,” said the angel. “I am a Servant of the Lord, and when I believe something, Reality takes notice.”

Once again, that was not one of his own lines. It had been one of Crowley’s — who, among his other extravagances of self-affirmation, had driven a rolling inferno fifty miles by refusing to accept the vehicle was more than mildly singed. The angel pressed the ‘PLAY’ button with more firmness than he felt.

_“Argh, not again. I know you’re in,”_ said Lisa Morrow’s recorded, frustrated voice. _“Okay. Well. Hi Dad, it’s about the plumber who’ll be visiting on Wednesday…”_

There were about a dozen variations on this theme, then a short silence. And then, there was something else. A static hiss that burst into speech:

 _“I win, Grant Tompkinsss!”_ crowed a sibilant laugh. _“Ssstick that in your Splashtronic, and sssmoke it!”_

Crowley’s year-old voice sounded out-of-breath, and drunk on winning the chase, but not exactly triumphant. It sounded worried.

_“…not my phone. Not my phone. Of all the times to bloody missdial…Okay, I can work with this…_

_…but who the seventh sssmegging Heaven is Trev Morrow…_

_…can’t take your call for the foreseeable…Oh, I get it. Great, pustulent, mangled bollocks!_

_…one bloody misssdial in six thousand yearss — and blam!”_ continued the demon’s recorded voice. “ _Hastur musst be laughing his tits off. Anyway, if you’re Trev Morrow, or even if you’re not, thanks for listening, and…it’sss your lucky day! My name is Crowley! The Original Crowley, not that ssshyster from Leamington Spa, and I have a mag-ni-fi-cent prize for you…_

“Is this typical for him?” whispered Lisa Morrow.

“Would it surprise you to learn that it’s relatively subdued?”

_“…just how much tape is left on thisss? Oh. Right. Ignore this next bit. Aziraphale! H’zr aph’aal. I know you’ll find me! Like I always found you. I have complete faith in you. You know I don’t pray, so thiss’ll have to do.”_

_“O-kay, where was I? Yeah, ssssorry again about your Free Will, but you’re going to call **this** number — oh yes, you are — and I will make it worth your while. You can thank me later. The number is Zero-Two-Zero, Seven-Four-Three-Nine —”_

_“—fuckit! Ow!”_

Lisa Morrow and Aziraphale exchanged looks. She held up her hand in the ancient gesture: fingers crossed. But there was only a terminal click, and no more words. The message had run out of tape.

“ _Sss,”_ whispered the old answerphone sadly, into the leafy, bee-filled glade that shielded the dene-hole frim prying eyes. _“Sss—sss—sss.”_

Aziraphale’s shoulder’s sagged, and the little green light on the machine blinked twice, then went out.

At first, Lisa Morrow thought it was coming on to rain. Then she looked up through June leaves at the very clear sky. Then she looked at Aziraphale again.

“Wait! You can’t do that, you’ll get the machine wet! Besides, you’re an angel! And besides, you’re an Eldritch Abomination! You can’t _cry!_ ”

Aziraphale became aware that he was being patted earnestly on both shoulders, and that only one of the things that was patting him had the right number of digits to be a human hand. The other had emerged tentatively from the dene-hole, and was about the size and heft of a weirdly-organic fire-hose — but being given a backrub by one of his own pseudopods wasn’t even in the top three strangest things that had happened to him that day.

Having persuaded its human representative to get a grip on himself, the roiling tentacle of eyespawn formed itself into the business end of a power cord, and became one with the socket in the back of the machine, in an union of Eldritch and human technology that it was probably best not to think about. At any rate, the power light came back on.

“That thing has more sense than you do,” said Lisa Morrow. She set her jaw. “There must be something else we can try.”

“My dear lady, I appreciate your pertinacity, but…”

“ _Iä!”_ Liza Morrow gave a startled yelp, and leapt to her feet. “Bloody flaming blazes, are you getting _fresh_ with me?”

It took Aziraphale a few moments to work out that she was not talking to him. At least, not exactly. The more practical and determined part of himself (which, as Lisa Morrow had divined, possessed more innate sense than he did) had taken the opportunity to unzip and riffle through her canvas bum-bag, while she was still wearing it. But it had mean no harm. It had been in search of one particular object, an object for which there was no word in R'lyehi even though the humanoid portion of Aziraphale was in the habit of using one — and a second pseudopod was now brandishing Lisa Morrow’s smartphone triumphantly in the air.

In the vibrating heat of the midsummer afternoon, in plummy tones no mortal had heard for thousands of years, and in words that were uttered in spite of there not being any actual mouth to utter them, a _voice_ came from the pit.

“ _U̶̞͔̥ln̡ ‘̛̪͎̙̟s̶oth?”_ it suggested politely. _“U̶̞͔̥ln̡ ‘̛̪͎̙̟͍s̶oth aza̡̖͚͉̯n̞a̹̫̗̙h? Ah̠̠̙or͕n̰͎̖͖͟ah’aza̡̖͚͉̯n̞a̹̫̗̙h fhta͎̥̘̙g̜n."  
_

“ _U̶̞͔̥ln̡ ‘̛̪͎̙̟s̶oth…_ you want me to _call_ something? _Me?”_ She turned to Aziraphale, who had gone rather pale. “What was that word, anyway? _Aza̡̖͚͉̯n̞a̹̫̗̙h?_ ”

“An uncommon one. It generally uses it — I mean, _we_ generally use that term to refer to Crowley. A hard ‘C’ is tricky for it to pronounce.”

Lisa Morrow held out her hand, and the pseudopod laid the phone in it gently.

“So. Your Eldritch half thinks I should be the one who calls Crowley, because Crowley is probably fast asleep.”

And the strange hope flared again in Aziraphale’s idiosyncratic heart. “You know, he really _might_ be asleep. He’s very good at it.”

“Aziraphale, has anyone ever told you that one part of you has all the brains, and they other has got all the fancy manners?”

“Once or twice. And I’m so sorry it — I mean, _we_ — we picked your pocket,” said the Eldritch angel. “But my phone was in my jacket when I left the shop and…I think something might have devoured it _en route_. I hope it didn’t give them indigestion.”

“Well, I hope it did.” Lisa Morrow gave the phone a discreet wipe on her jeans. “Right. Here’s what we’re going to do: _you_ stay out of this, just for a moment, and that means both of you. All of you. Whatever. _I’ll_ call the answerphone. And if Crowley is still on there, however deeply asleep or dormant he is or whatever demons do in their downtime, then I promise you it’ll work. Not because I believe it will, but because I’m a professional at getting people up to pick up when they don’t want to. I can call them when they’re in the shower, I can call them when they’re painting a ceiling, I can call them when they’re in their vinegar strokes, and so I reckon I stand a fair chance of calling up a demon who’s taking a power nap on the last few seconds of possessed answerphone cassette. Unless you have a better idea?”

Aziraphale shook his head, and the answerphone rewound the tape, just slightly, to the last few seconds.

“For once,” he said, “I have to admit that I do not.”

Lisa Morrow scrolled through her contacts list to where there was still an entry headed ‘Dad’, then tapped it. And one Abominable angel and one not-entirely-mainstream human held their breaths.

———

After four rings, the greeting message picked up: _‘Trev Morrow can’t take your call for the foreseeable, so kindly bugger off after the tone’._

Silence.

More silence.

Beeeeeep!

Lisa Morrow braced herself to once again utter the words that had changed the course of her life.

“Good afternoon,” she trilled, “and am I speaking to Mr. Anthony Crowley?”

There was no response. Her voice took on a sugary determination.

“A year ago, you had a bit of an accident. It wasn’t your fault — ”

Aziraphale bowed his head, and the little green light on the answering machine began to fade. His Eldritch side got a grip on itself, and its plugged-in appendage powered the machine up more strongly. Lisa Morrow glared at him until the little green light glowed steadily again. She took a deep breath.

“ — and that means _you,_ Mr. Crowley, are entitled to compensation.”

Beneath the yellowed plastic window, spools of the message tape began to rotate once more — but backwards. They went sluggishly at first, then accelerated until they were going at dubbing speed. Then they went faster, impossibly so, and as the angel and the human watched, the whole answerphone levitated six inches above the log it had been resting on. A crack appeared around its circumference, the air filled with the scent of toasted plastic, and half a dozen red-hot screws burrowed themselves out of its base and lay sizzling on the floor of the little glade.

“Don’t touch it!” warned Aziraphale, and got another of Lisa Morrow’s glares in return. “If it needs to be handled, I will do the honours.”

“No bloody fear. Miracles are weird, fair enough, but this is…aggressively weird.”

The answerphone began to vibrate, until it was a pale, suspended blur. Aziraphale grabbed it (it really was quite uncomfortably warm) and peered through the newly-formed crack into what should have been its electronic innards. Instead, he saw the blackness of Deep Space, or possibly, deep Time. _Snake of the Skies,_ he thought, _I can bear everything, except false hope._

“Is it…is that thing _hatching?_ ” asked Lisa Morrow.

“I rather think it might be.”

She grinned. “Well, that’s terrific, isn’t it? Why’re you looking so worried?”

“Um. At this juncture I should probably mention that in the event this works, Anthony might — well, he might, just conceivably, manifest as a snake? It has been known to happen.”

“Riiight. So, Mr. Anthony J. Crowley might _conceivably_ be a snake. That’s a get-out clause if ever I heard one.” Lisa Morrow stared at Aziraphale’s hands, as hot plastic began to buckle beneath his fingers, but it would take a great deal more than that to harm an Eldritch angel. “ _Azanah._ That’s what it means, isn’t it, in your own language? _Serpent._ He’s absolutely, definitely going to be a snake, isn’t he?”

Aziraphale nodded. The answerphone was getting heavier and heavier. Any more of this, and he’d have to summon some of his reserve strength to hold it up.

“And considering what _you_ are, and that I’ve met Hastur, this is going to bother me how, exactly?”

“Well. Crowley might be a vast demonic serpent from one of the less salubrious Infernal postcodes, or he _might_ only be the size of a grass snake. I don’t think he has complete control over the size. But he’s a decent sort of serpent. The best, really. Though he can get into moods.”

Without more ado, the top of the answering machine shot off its base and landed on a nearby mole-hill, where it burst into sulphurous flame. Whatever was inside it was jet black, with two tiny, amber points of light suspended within it, like very distant stars.

Lisa Morrow had very sensibly backed up against a tree, her eyes wide as saucers.

“But it’s all bluster, you see,” continued Aziraphale brightly. “Anthony fights with his wits; prides himself on it. I’m almost totally certain he’s never envenomated anybody.”

“ _Almost?”_

Every living creature in the fenced-off, overgrown corner of Dene Meadow fell silent. Not a grasshopper chirped. Not a bird peeped. As if a hole the size of a soup-plate had been punched into a vat of treacle, _something_ came pouring out of the half-answerphone held in Aziraphale’s grasp. It came out in a series of muscular loops, fluid as chain-mail — or, less majestically, like a very large helping of soft-serve Liquorice n’ Chili ice-cream.

At last, the head of a substantial serpent emerged, apparently fast asleep, and pillowed itself neatly atop its own body with a gentle pat. When in snake form, Crowley still slept with his eyes open, a thing that even Aziraphale had always found disconcerting — though you could always tell when the old tempter was out of it by the narrowness of his pupils, and the rythmic _ssss-zz_ of his breathing.

“Gosh,” murmured Aziraphale. He felt light-headed — and not just metaphorically. He turned down his halo a couple of notches, and the Eldritch glow emerging from the dene-hole took the hint too. He’d gripped the molten base of Trevor Morrow’s answering machine so hard that the end result could probably be displayed in Tate Modern.

Lisa Morrow walked around the heap of snoozing serpent, like someone trying to make head or tail of another particularly strange art exhibit.

“So this is the culprit,” she said at last. “I didn’t know snakes could snore.”

“As I said, he’s _very_ good at sleeping. Makes Rip van Winkle look like an amateur. And I’ve always found the sibilance charming.”

“I bet you have, you weirdo.” She picked a twig from the ground, and tapped the sleeper boldly on his snout. “Oi! You scaly bastard! Wakey wakey.”

“Ssss-zz…ssss-zz…ssss-zz…sss?”

The tip of a forked tongue appeared, withdrew, then flickered at length in the chlorophyll scents of the coppice, with an intelligence of its own. Dark pupils shot wide, from slits to almonds.

“Ssss-ZZZ…”

Abruptly, the hiss went from ‘leaky bellows’ to ‘nick in a pressurised steam hose’, and then it formed itself into a word, and the word was —

“SSZziraphale!” exclaimed the Serpent of Eden.

“My dear boy!” cried the Abominable Angel.

“ _Ṯ̪h̢ro͙̟̻̩ḓ̭og h̬a͓͈f͓͍̠h̜͕̮'̛drn ot̙̠ ̶ąz̳͟a̹n͈̳a̤h͍̣̙,”_ observed a cultivated gurgle from twenty feet below ground.

“I did so _not_ miss my vocation as a snake-charmer,” replied Lisa Morrow between her teeth. “This is a one-time gig.”

The great snake uncoiled itself luxuriously, then performed the sort of yawn only possible when one’s jaws are jointed in eight different places. Infernal flame licked across the its scales from the inside, creating an effect that Louis Comfort Tiffany would have sold his soul to achieve. The air above the creature trembled.

In depictions of the Temptation of Eve, the Serpent is sometimes depicted as part-human. This is because an inspired artist, when imagining a demon or an angel, can access a personal vision of the entity in question, and the vision tends to phase between that entity’s possible forms. William Blake, who was too barmy to fool, knew a demon snake when he saw one and drew just that, but Mantegna and Fuseli were sure the thing had a human face, Bosch also gave it arms, Michelangelo reckoned it was a woman with serpentine legs (only on special occasions), and the less said about Hugo van der Goes’ effort, the better. None of these artists would have been able to depict what was currently happening to Crowley.

As he had sometimes complained to the angel, the trouble with traditional, two-phase shapeshifting was that you had to start _somewhere_ , and if you got interrupted half-way, things could get awkward. But at least there was precedent for a human torso on a serpentine body, and while it rarely helps to turn into a Naga, it’s even trickier to look credible as a two-legged snake. The snake’s snout grew shorter, and the jaw grew deeper, and its marigold eyes moved from the sides of its head to the front, in a way that would have disconcerted most people — at least, most people who weren’t Aziraphale or Lisa Morrow.

At last Crowley, now in human form, sat up and clutched his head, like a man with a hangover he’d done nothing to deserve, and wiggled his toes experimentally. He was still wearing what he’d been wearing on that fateful day in Regent’s Park, minus the jacket which had fallen victim to Grant Tompkins and his RogueWave of Doom. Spending a year packed down in sleeping memory hadn’t done Crowley’s shirt and jeans any good, nor had it done wonders for his hair. His sunglasses were missing, and he favoured Lisa Morrow with an acid-yellow glare.

“ _Wakey, wakey?_ Only one persson’s allowed to talk to me like that,” he hissed, “and it certainly issn’t _you,_ whoever you are. Where the blessed Heaven am I?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> RE: U̶̞͔̥ln̡ ‘̛̪͎̙̟͍s̶oth aza̡̖͚͉̯n̞a̹̫̗̙h? Ah̠̠̙or͕n̰͎̖͖͟ah’aza̡̖͚͉̯n̞a̹̫̗̙h fhta͎̥̘̙g̜n." etc., which is a wild stab at actual translation.
> 
> I would like to report that the R'lyehian dictionaries available online are extremely deficient, possibly to protect the over-curious. I feel I should also warn the unwary that ASMR R'lyehian videos exist on Youtube. Seriously, I have heard things no mortal ear should ever hear. Good God, people. Save yourselves.
> 
> The phone shenanigans was inspired by [this rather amazing story](https://understandinguncertainty.org/user-submitted-coincidences/public-phone-box), courtesy of the Cambridge Coincidences Collection.
> 
> The dial codes for Mayfair Village (020 7499) and Nine Elms (020 7498) are genuine. While re-reading this whole monstrosity for spelling/continuity cleanup, it occurs to me that there's no explanation of why Lisa apparently also mislaid her phone on the 21st of June and had to call her Dad with a keyphone, leading her to misdial and leave the Mysterious Bolognese Message on Crowley's secret answering machine. Let's just pretend there is, because otherwise I will go quite as potty as one of Lovecraft's luckless protagonists.


End file.
